When I first started working in the non-profit world and a client asked for a new program, I searched what was available back in 1989 and came up with a nifty little program from a small Austin, TX based company. It was DOS based, locked into 5 segments but did just about everything our client required. The program was MIP Fund Accounting.
In those days, the company name, MIP (Micro Information Products) became synonymous with the product. Whether you said the letters or called it mip, everyone knew what you were talking about.
In 2001, MIP sold to Sage Software, another acquisition based company that was gobbling up accounting software companies like a voracious raptor. Best Software, State of the Art, Peachtree, DAC Easy, One Write Plus and eventually Accpac and Platinum for Windows all became part of the Sage empire.
And in their style, Sage decided that their company name trumped all so they started dropping the individual software names, MIP, AccPac, MAS90, etc. in favor of a Sage based, European numbering system. Is it my imagination or do Americans prefer names to numbers? Just look at cars, the Ford Fusion, Focus, Buick Le Sabre. Then there’s the Audi A4, BMW 328 and Saab 93. But I digress.
The end result is we were saddled with Sage 100 Fund Accounting to denote a mid-market (100) product with a fund accounting emphasis and a mouthful to boot. But the bottom line is we all still called it MIP.
This spring, Sage decided that non-profit, along with a few other things like CRM, really weren’t their balliwick and divested of the non-profit division along with Sage CRM, and ACT! along with 4 European divisions to Accel-KKR, a private equity investment firm with a very diverse portfolio of technology companies. Four months later, Abila was revealed to the world as the new owner of this timeless piece of non-profit accounting software.
So here we are, six month post acquisition, and 25 years later, with the return of that first name in fund accounting software, MIP. And we’re so glad to have it back.