Your business still runs on MS Access. The talent to maintain it is getting harder to find.
Softenger takes ownership of the MS Access applications your business depends on — stabilising and supporting them today, and modernizing or migrating them when it makes business sense.
Your operations stop depending on one person — or on a hire that isn’t coming.
- ISO 27001:2022
- ISO 9001:2015
- Remote delivery
- 24×7 support available
Three situations we hear before most MS Access engagements.
Different starting points, the same underlying problem: a business-critical application and no one it can reliably depend on to keep it running.
MS Access was never just a database. That is why it is so hard to replace the people who built on it.
For two decades, MS Access let a business build its own software. Data, forms, reports and business logic lived in a single application shaped exactly to how the company worked — built by someone in-house who knew both the business and VBA.
Those applications became the way the business runs: inventory, orders, production tracking, quality records, reporting. The platform stayed. The people who built it moved on or retired, and the skill to maintain what they left behind has become scarce and expensive to hire in the US.
The developers who built it have gone
Retired, moved roles or left the company. What they knew about the application went with them.
The skill is scarce — and costly when you find it
Experienced Access and VBA developers are a shrinking pool. Recruiting one takes months; keeping one is harder.
Nothing is documented
Not the code, the data structure, nor the business rules. Users know what the application does, but not why it was built that way.
Updates break it
Moving to a newer version of Windows or Office surfaces 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility errors in code nobody left can read.
It is connected to more than anyone has mapped
Shared network files, other applications, external websites. Change one piece and something else stops working.
So the business stops changing it
Every request is weighed against the risk of breaking daily operations. The application quietly becomes the limit on how the business can work.
The developers who built it have gone expanded.