Custom business software · Newport, NSW
Cook's Computer Services
The software business of Di Cook, run from 22 Myola Road, Newport, on Sydney's northern beaches.
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 DOS and later in Microsoft Access and Word.
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 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, couriers, manufacturers, a bakery, a forensic institute and a university college — each one a small, exact fit for how that organisation actually worked.
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 being built into it — the same ideas (the matter register, the job packet, the plan register, time that turns into fees) on modern bones: bank feeds, BAS, payroll and Single Touch Payroll included.
This domain is kept in her honour.