AccuTrack History

The idea behind AccuTrack came to life in 1994 when Jay, one of Engineerica Systems' founders, was studying for his Master's in Computer Engineering at the University of Central Florida. Jay also worked as a tutor in the Academic Resource Center. At the time, the staff at the tutoring center was spending almost 2 weeks at the end of each semester manually tabulating usage data from sign-in sheets. As you can guess, this was a time-consuming and painful process. Knowing that he had a strong background in computers, the director of the center asked Jay if he could write a program to automate the data reporting process. With assistance of his Engineerica partners, Jay designed and wrote a sign-in program for the tutoring center. This program was written in Clipper and ran on a 386 computer using MS-DOS.

The tutoring center used this sign-in program for a few years and it made the process of tracking sign-ins much easier. By observing how the program worked in real usage situations and how students and staff interacted with it, Jay envisioned many improvements. In 1997 the program was re-written for Windows 95 using MS Visual Basic and Access. The enhanced sign-in program looked much better that its predecessor and included new features such as the ability to report on visitor's demographics.

Shortly after developing the UCF software another Engineerica founder, Mon Nasser, decided to take the concept to a commercial level. Mon completely redesigned and re-wrote the software using a professional database engine from Microsoft - Visual FoxPro. It took many months of hard work to create and then market the new software. In April of 1998 AccuTrack got its first customer when the University of West Florida ordered a license. Other colleges followed.

As more centers used the software, administrators from these center requested new features. For example, Pima Community College in Arizona and Laney College in California requested the appointments scheduling module. Pima Community College also requested the media checkouts module. De Anza College in California requested the staff work-hours tracking module. The idea for the traffic analysis module came from The University of Akron in Ohio. Appointments and no-show reporting was requested by Loyola Marymount University in California. Many other colleges and universities contributed by giving feedback which went into constantly improving the software. Of course AccuTrack developers and other employees also contributed with their own ideas.

As a result, AccuTrack grew from a simple sign-in program to comprehensive academic center software. Not only is the software used in tutoring centers, but it is also used in advising centers, math labs, writing labs, the library, the gym, and any place where you need to track visits or schedule appointments. Today hundreds of academic centers in colleges and universities across the U.S. and abroad depend on AccuTrack for collecting their data and managing their day-to-day operations.

Of course, the best way to know the software is to see it in action. Request a complimentary online demo to see what AccuTrack can do for your center.