Falcon Distribution was running a system built in 1999. Here's what happened when they replaced it.

Falcon Distribution ran on CAVE. It had been built in 1999 and never really updated for how complicated tax has gotten since.

"They build things like it's something they built back in 1999," Ryan Shea, president of Falcon Distribution, said about it. "It literally was built in 1999."

Here's what that meant in practice: the tax line on an invoice couldn't be trusted. Eleven dollars of tax would show up as twenty-seven. Somebody on the team had to know, invoice by invoice, which numbers were right and which needed a manual fix before it went out the door. That's not a rounding error. That's a person, every day, re-checking a system that's supposed to do the checking for them.

And Falcon wasn't standing still while this was going on. The business was growing fast — from around 100 accounts toward 300. A system built in 1999 doesn't scale with that. It just breaks in more places, more often.

What actually needed to change

The problem was never one broken feature. It was the whole stack — order, inventory, tax, invoice — living in a system nobody had touched in twenty-five years.

Think about a sales order as a contract. That's really all it is. The purchase order is a contract too. If those documents don't flow through one system, from the order to the invoice to the cash hitting the bank, somebody's stitching it together by hand every week. That's what CAVE was asking Falcon's team to do.

Ruby Pro's approach isn't to bolt a tax fix onto the old system. It's to run the whole thing — order to cash, inventory, tax calculation — as one connected process, so the invoice a customer receives already has the right number on it. No manual correction. No separate spreadsheet reconciling what the system said against what actually got paid.

Why the risk was worth taking

Replacing the system a distributor has run on for two and a half decades is not a small decision. And it's not an out-of-the-box swap — the setup gets built around how Falcon actually runs, tax handling included. There's no charge for that build.

The data stays Falcon's throughout the process. Ruby Pro makes no claim over it.