The IS4C administrative backend, Fannie, began it's life at Whole Foods Co-op as a product maintenance and reporting back end that ran on MySQL. It was built by Christoff von Rabenau as an alternative to the ICL back end that WFC was using. When IS4C was installed at People's Food Co-op, Joel Brock modified and expanded Chris' work to better suit his needs at PFC. A synchronization mechanism was put in place to take data from the MySQL tables and pass it to IS4C lanes. Other modules were later added, and Fannie came into being both as a suit of application modules and as a frame work to which other modules could be added.

Fannie is a work in progress. As front end features are continuously being developed and added to IS4C by the 4 co-ops using it, back end modules are added to Fannie as needed by People's Food Co-op and Alberta Co-op Grocery, the two co-ops using it. It should be noted that it was Matthaus Littelken at Alberta Co-op who wrote the membership module specifically to suit their needs. We hope that some of the existing modules, tending to standard needs, would be of general use to other co-op. The main thrust of Fannie development, as I understand, is to add modules and functionalities where necessary, make it easier to administrate IS4C lanes, expand the capability to pull customized reports from the data, and to make everything generally more user friendly.