Building Your Own UCR System - Part 3

Unregistered Carriers on 7/23/2009 - 2922
Unregistered Carriers on 7/24/2009 - 2894
Yesterday's Registrations (IL system) - 28 / $2629 (avg $93)

OK, so you're thinking about building your own UCR system. Can you? Yes. Should you? Well, let's look into that a little bit.

As we explore this topic, remember this:

The Indiana solution costs you nothing. Building your own system will cost you something - probably more than you think.

Even if you personally don't care about that, somebody above you more than likely does - especially in these times of "austerity".

I'm going to throw out a number ... $100,000. That's about what I think you should assume it costs to build your own system. It's probably a lot more than $100K to build and maintain your own system, but that number will get the point across. In other words, the reasons that you come up with for building your own system should at least offset (and preferably exceed) that cost figure of $100,000 or you probably don't have valid reasons for building your own system. If that reasoning doesn't jump up and slap you right in the face, keep reading it until it does. And here's the kicker: for every reason you come up with, I can probably come up with a cheaper, better alternative. There are a couple of exceptions to my claim, which I'll confess to before I'm done here.

Let's start with an unlikely starting point - accounting. Is it better to do your work in the Indiana system and process a check/EFT from them 30 days later --- or process the registrations every hour of every day in your own system and do all the financial reconciliation work necessary to handle the funds? There is no right or wrong answer, but the appropriate process might be to think about all of the people who are required to handle the funds under each scenario and then calculate the difference --- and there will be a difference!