bail bond software

The real answer is to establish your needs, wants and desires and see if available software can meet or exceed these items at a cost/benefit ratio you can live with. I did this and developed my own program that is proprietary, simple and works for me. If you are an MGA it probably would not work for you. My issues with existing programs, and I was a beta tester for one previously mentioned, is that they were too cumbersome and time consuming. My needs are simple! You just gotta love Google Docs, now Google Drive!

Scott

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R.E. "Scott" MacLean III

"Leaders are like Eagles, you never see them in a flock, but one at a time"

Chesapeake Group Investigations, Inc.
Chesapeake Bail Bonds
877-574-0500
301-392-1100 (fax)
301-392-1900 (Office)

I am MGA and I only use Bail Books. I use Bail Books for six years now, it's a great program. I have in total 23 agents that work for me in all so far.

Bail Books give you a 30 day free trial. I would say try it and if you don't like it, move on to something else.

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Steve Faircloth
A Way Out Bail Bonds
(220) 204-9733 Cell
NSIN# SF0105
LIC. #704058

Before deciding on building your own, or using excel spreadsheets and outside the productivity factor. Please consider a couple of key elements with storing data.

Data Integrity
How will you ensure your data is not modified without your knowledge, all your calculations and payments to your surety company are based off this. If someone were to modify the file without your knowledge this could throw off a lot of your accounting

Security
You're Access program or similar suites used to build custom applications, is usually stored on your computer, and has very sensitive data in it, social security numbers paired with names/addresses. In this day and age identity theft is huge, so are viruses you pickup on most of the popular social sites. If someone gains access to your machine they could easily send this information to others. Are you encrypting the socials, rotating out the encryption key etc?

Backups
In most of the cases where I've seen custom apps, or apps purchased that were once a custom app backups are rarely performed. So if you loose the main machine, your data is gone. I've seen people backup to the same drive on the same computer, which doesn't give you much assurance, even another machine in the office. Acts of nature etc can still destroy all computers in the office, even a bad virus can,

Single point of failure
Most of the time when running these types of apps it's run/stored on one machine and shared to others in the office, what happens if that computer experiences some type of failure, either through a virus or hard drive failure etc. Is your office now at a stand still?

So if you're going to step into writing your own software, please be aware of these points. You need to ensure data cannot be modified without your knowledge, that you are backing up regularly to an off-site location, you don't have a single point of failure that could seriously hold up your business if it fails, as well as encrypting any sensitive data as an additional backup plan in case someone gains access to it

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Erik St. Martin
Sr. Software Engineer / Owner BondKeeper LLC

I designed my own stuff.... real simple.... Quicken and Excel.... not even QuickBooks.... little or no costs and I keep everything and back it up at least two times on portable hard drives and my 'mainframe'... no one else has access and none of it ever goes online or out of my office. I am a sole proprietor.

It ain't sophisticated but it works and its simple and its cheap... KISS principle.



Don't spend your money on anything but toys, women, guns and booze... and the toys last longer... and all ya have to do to them is keep em in the garage, guns in your pocket and the booze in the cabinet.... not sure where the women are stashed....... that's usually a value judgement ..................

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Bill Marx, Sr.
"FREE STATE BAIL BONDS"
"FREE STATE INVESTIGATIONS"
DCJS: 99-176979
Cell: 434-294-0222

"Endeavor to Persevere" "Lone Watie"

"Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that , comes from bad judgment" "Will Rogers"

I'm not saying that designing your own program or workflow is a bad choice, just that you'd want to consider some of these things, and what risk you're willing to expose yourself to. Each of you know what your own needs are, and your particular daily workflow.

Online isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided precautions are taken much of the sensitive data you use on a daily basis is online, bank accounts, credit cards, stock, social security data, 401k data, credit data, etc. It just needs to be secure. Encryption, Firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems.

Windows installs that have not been updated can be infected within as little as 5 minutes, up to a couple hours of connecting them to the internet, and malware spreads across all the computers on your network just as fast, and some corrupt data, some corrupt systems data so the system won't start, some allow your computer to be a zombie drone for hackers to use in other attacks, and some just send data such as keystrokes, and files out to be used by however the attacker sees fit and you never know they are there.

And viruses spread in more ways than just internet connections, if your computer can talk to another device that is on the internet, or was on the internet it's possible for an infected machine to infect the other, viruses also can be contained within emails, usb storage devices that you've put files that are already infected on etc.

I'd just really advise no matter the format, or application you use that you ensure you're system stays up to date, you have anti-virus and a software firewall, you backup the data regularly, and also don't store the data in an unencrypted form, you have sensitive data, including ssn's, addresses, and phone numbers for your defendants, which is sold on the internet regularly.

Even if you use a software stack created by someone else, ask them how they handle these things.

An added note about email
It is not secure, please do not send confidential/sensitive data via email in an unencrypted form.

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Erik St. Martin
Sr. Software Engineer / Owner BondKeeper LLC