36 years of records, live in under a month

Forrests Music has been the place serious oboists and bassoonists shop since 1944. For most of the last four decades, the business ran on a DOS-era FoxPro system — a faithful recorder of every sale, rental, and trial that could answer almost nothing about them. The records were an asset the shop could not read.

This summer, Forrests moved 36 years of operating history onto bsns: 6,155 catalog items, 112,954 customers, 474,670 sales across 1.7 million line items, 4,912 instrument trials, and 675 rentals with 17 years of payment history. Preserved without losing a row — and live in under a month. The same product records now drive the counter, the stockroom, and the new online store at forrestsmusic.com.

What the old reports had missed

The value was not simply preserving the past. Once products, sales, rentals, and customers were in one place, the owner could see patterns the old reports had missed: a years-long price freeze on the shop’s own house-made products (vendor-supplied goods got repriced when invoices arrived; house-made goods never triggered a review), and a fast-growing recurring revenue stream that had never appeared in the sales reports the owner read.

None of that took a data science project. It’s what happens when the catalog, the sales ledger, the rentals, and the customer list stop being four separate piles.

Only the beginning

Forrests has barely scratched the surface — the counter, the catalog, rentals, and the storefront today, with the rest of the connected system (agreements, expenses, staffing) still ahead of them. That’s the honest state of it, and it’s exactly how we like to start: run the shop first, grow into the rest.

If you run a shop with decades of history in a system you can’t read anymore, that’s the exact problem we built for.