In the early 1990′s, Alan Anderson, then President of Geneseo Communications, was dissatisfied with the AS400 billing software they had been using. He felt that it was antiquated and didn’t offer his staff the flexibility for change or improvements. In a discussion with his son-in-law, Bill Farb, he voiced his frustration only to hear Farb reply that he could do his billing on a PC. This intrigued Anderson and thus the challenge began.
How could they develop a billing system on a Windows Platform that his staff could operate on a PC? With Farb’s background in CAD design, he began to face the challenge head-on. In 1992, Farb and Don Gollahon began programming the system in Springfield, IL from Farb’s home. Within the year, both Farb and Gallahon moved to Geneseo to work inside the phone company so they could show the staff their development and get input into how to improve their product along the way. This progressed for some time until both parties felt that everything they needed to bill their customers and run their company was in this software program. Then came the dilemma of “what do we call this?” Anderson wanted to incorporate the city of Geneseo into the name, so he chose the first three letters from Geneseo and added soft at the end to indicate that he was in the software business; thus GenSoft was selected!
GenSoft was officially incorporated as its own business on January 3, 1995. At that time we had six employees. The phone company utilized this program so much that they knew other companies would as well. At that point GenSoft decided to market their software to other independent telephone companies.
And as they say, the rest is history. We have grown exponentially in both number of clients and our employees. We are proud of the progressiveness of our product, the support and input of our customers, and our dedicated staff.