About GrateSoft
This Auction Database was started about 2002 to serve a need. Our Christian school started hosting an annual benefit auction. It was necessary to keep track of the donations that came in so we could properly thank the donors and produce tax deductible receipts for their donations. We wanted to reward the donors and solicitors for their efforts by providing free tickets to those who donated above a set dollar amount or who sold more than a set amount of tickets. We also rewarded our solicitors by offering vouchers that could be spent on auction items, providing the solicitor criteria was met. All of these rewards are automatically tracked in the program according to the user’s setup parameters.
As the auctions progressed year after year, the auction database grew with the auction and many beneficial features were added. The program started out printing the silent auction information on adhesive address labels so they could be applied to pre-printed silent bid sheets. This feature which replaces the hand writing on the forms is still available in the program. Later, reports were added to print the full silent bid sheets with blank lines for the buyer number and price and some time later, a special feature was added that prints pre-priced silent bid sheets, deriving the dollar amounts from the reported value of the donated item. This pre-printed bid sheet can cause items to bring a lot higher selling price because it forced folks to use the next bid price rather than raising the bid by only $1.00 at a time. After several years, the checkout section was developed so that the non-profit organization could save money by doing its own checkout process on the night of the auction rather than paying an auction service to do this for them.
Around the auction of 2007, a highly recognized professional benefit auctioneer suggested that this program needed to be marketed. Originally the program had been developed only for our Christian school and was not very flexible. There was no provision for the user to change the name of the school or return address on the reports, receipts and other areas of the program. By the next year’s auction, many changes had been made to allow the user to enter the name and address of the auction owner and to change the incentives and other setup information for the auction.
All of this time the program had only been capable of tracking one single auction at a time. In preparation for the next year’s auction, the donation and ticket data tables were cleared and made ready for the new auction information.
The next huge step for the program was to add another level of tracking ability so the program would be able to track every auction and never lose any history. This was no small task as there were over 250 tables, forms, reports and queries that needed modified to accomplish this. After these changes were made, it became very easy to add another auction. The user even has the option of copying the setup information and the solicitor’s list from another auction so that if the same organization has a yearly auction, the setup information from a previous auction can be copied into the new auction with only minimal changes needing to be made. After a lot of testing, and many modifications to fix bugs and enhance user friendliness, the program was nearing completion.
This program was developed by people who actually run the benefit auction from year to year with input from a long time professional auctioneer who specializes in benefit auctions.