🚀 go-pugleaf

Delft University of Technology chose MICS some 5 years ago, when faced
with the requirement to bill for the use of MVS, VM/CMS, VAX, print
services, and staff services.  Since then, they dropped the VM/CMS and
VAX services, but added Unix (Convex) accounting to MICS using the user
component interface in MICS.  MICS is a rich architecture to store MVS
data and data from other sources (VAX is now supported), and one of the
applications running on MICS is accounting.  MICS comes from Legent.

If your only application is accounting, MICS is too much for you (and
too costly).  You may want to look at MXG from Barry Merrill PH.D. and
now sold by SAS Institute as CPE.  SAS added a backend that can be used
for accounting.  My experience with accounting code is you always end up
rewriting the reporting modules and the cost assignment algorithm.
Delft U. did so with MICS, and would do so with MXG.

The cost of MXG is negligible compared to its functions.  It would
take about the same effort to keep operational as MICS (i.e. building
an accounting application for MXG from scratch?), MICS takes a lot
of time to run every day and a lot of head aches to convert from one
service release to the next.

If I were faced with an MVS accounting project I would no longer use a
"ready made" package like MICS of KOMAND, because I've exeprienced the
problems of adding your management's requirements into a fixed frame
program.  I would use MXG as the data collector, and write the reporting
code in SAS myself.

Rob van Hoboken
Delft University of Technology