Custom business software · since 1986
Cook's Computer Services
The software business of Di Cook — from North Parramatta in the 1980s, then 22 Myola Road, Newport, on Sydney's northern beaches, until 2013.
Di Cook was one of the early small-business coders in Australia. From the family home in Newport she wrote, sold and supported accounting software for two professions that the big packages ignored — barristers and surveyors — and built custom systems for dozens of other organisations: membership databases, stock control, invoicing, order books and reporting systems — first in FoxPro under DOS, later in Microsoft Access and Word.
In April 1992 she wrote to the NSW Bar Association to correct an article claiming a new Macintosh program was the first billing software ever written for barristers. Hers had been on sale for five or six years by then, and she was already shipping version 2.
Her customers kept using her software for ten and twenty years, not because it was flashy but because it did exactly what their practice needed, and because when they rang, she answered.
“The best part about the accounting system was that Di came along with it.”
— one of her barristers
The systems
Barrister's Accounting System
Built around the Register of Matters — every brief, every memorandum of fees rendered, every payment received, and what's still outstanding, at a glance. Solicitor ledgers, automatic reminder letters, a hearing diary, timesheets that flowed into memos with work-in-progress, and an expenses side with bank reconciliation. Used by Sydney silks and junior counsel alike, some for well over a decade.
Surveyor's Accounting System
Client → job → job packet → invoice → monthly statement, with timesheets dissected by employee and job, job costing, a register of deposited plans so the office never paid twice for a plan it already held, and more than forty reports. Developed in Australia for Australian surveyors.
Alongside these she built customised solutions for associations, publishers and couriers, for manufacturers and a healthcare company, for a bakery, a forensic institute and a college at the University of Sydney — each one a small, exact fit for how that organisation actually worked. Membership systems, stock control, invoicing, marketing follow-up: whatever the business needed, built to measure in Access and Word.
Leave a note for Di
If you knew Di, or used one of her systems over the years, she and her family would love to hear from you — a memory, a hello, a word of thanks. Notes are read by the family before they appear here.
Continued in Runac
Di's son David founded Runac, Australian accounting software for small business. Updated versions of the Barrister's and Surveyor's systems are now part of it — the same ideas (the matter register, memoranda of fees, the job register with lot and plan, the plan register, time that turns into fees) on modern bones: bank feeds, BAS, payroll and Single Touch Payroll included. Try the barrister or surveyor demo.
Di has long since retired from the keyboard. Her son David keeps this page for her — part thank-you to his mum, part record of everything she built.