25th Anniversary of Thinking Software

In 2019, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Thinking Software. Rota Horizon is being used in hotels, factories, warehouses and offices around the world. Every day our system processes more than 750,000 employee time-recording transactions.

Those transactions represent many tens of thousands of hours of people’s working lives and the basis of their pay.

Getting people’s pay correct is a huge responsibility and Rota Horizon has become the go-to solution for shift planning, over-time management, absence management and pay calculations for over 250 clients. Every one of our customers benefits from significant cost and time-savings.

Thinking Software is proud to be celebrating a quarter of a century in business this September.

So how did it all begin? Steve Rothkopf, Thinking Software’s Managing Director tells us:

“I was sitting at my kitchen table back in 1994, wondering what I could do to help businesses become more cost-effective.

I’d had some reasonable success in the restaurant business, and after we sold our group to a PLC, I’d spent a few pretty underwhelming years trying to build a hospitality-focussed point-of-sale system. It’s hard to believe now, but back in those days, building a system meant manufacturing your own hardware as well as writing the software to drive it. I began to realise that we didn’t have the organisation or the capital to do both. Our system was good, and we had plenty of interested potential clients, but our cash was dwindling while we heaved away trying to close deals.

So, almost as an experiment, I went back to my small-enterprise roots and wrote a simple Time & Attendance System, and named it ROTA. Then I put an advert for it in a random computer magazine and went off on holiday with no real expectations for its success.

The results were astonishing. We sold 30 systems in a matter of the few weeks I was away, and Thinking Software, complete with exactly one employee (me), was born.”

Twenty-five years later, and operating from a complex of restored barns that overlook the Windrush valley in the Cotswolds, Thinking Software still provides Time & Attendance Systems to hundreds of businesses across the world. What’s more, after several years of intense research and development, the company has launched Musterd, its powerful new Roll Call and Evacuation app.

The success of the two systems comes from providing solutions that are designed to give customers real value. “Our products are developed in-house by a highly-skilled team of software engineers. User experience, simplicity and flexibility are at the heart of our applications.”

We would like to thank all of our loyal customers, some of whom have partnered with us for over 20 years. We have a full roadmap of new features for our existing systems and new applications that will continue to increase efficiency and mitigate risk. We look forward to continuing to serve our current clients as well as partnering with new ones over the next 25 years.