Ryerson’s Used Book Room is counting its losses after ongoing computer problems forced the store to shut down during this semester’s lucrative first week of classes.

“We really didn’t expect it would take this long to get it ready,” said Toby Whitfield, vice-president finance and services of the Ryerson Students’ Union, which runs the book room.

“Our goal was initially to have revenues of $620,000 this year. We probably won’t hit that.”

The loss in sales is the most recent financial blow to hit the troubled facility, which has been closed for most of the school year after a server crash in September erased all the inventory records.

The union will be reviewing the store’s projected annual revenue in the coming weeks. Whitfield said the revised number could be as much as $40,000 less than what was expected at the beginning of the school year.

“It’s still too early to know exactly how much (the store’s lost),” he said.

The book room was scheduled to open Jan. 5 for the new semester.  However, the store’s new cataloguing program required new bar codes be given to the 10,000 or so books lining its aisles.

Despite hiring additional part-time staff to help, the book room didn’t open to customers until the following Monday, Jan. 12 — missing out on three of the most profitable days of the year and sending would-be customers elsewhere to buy their books.

Bikram Gill visited the Used Book Room on Friday, Jan. 9, after his first chemistry class to pick up the course’s textbook. In past semesters, the second-year student has nabbed some good deals from the store, saving upwards of $100 on several books.

“But the door was locked and I got worried. The book cost like $200 new and I can’t afford that,” he said. “But if I don’t get (the course text) in time, it would be too much work to catch up.”

He returned to the book room the following Tuesday only to find a line at least 60 people long that snaked down the hallway.

Gill, like dozens of students he saw, walked away.

Still, the book room made more than $100,000 in sales last week. And while the money doesn’t cover what the business would have made had it been open the week prior, Whitfield said the windfall would help the book room from running a bigger deficit.

“It sucks that students were coming in on Wednesday and Thursday (and Friday) to find us closed and had to go somewhere else . . . But considering everything, we are still doing really well,” he said.

As well, book room employee Chris Drew said the ordeal has forced the business to invest in a better database.

“It was frustrating, but the new program is a vastly improved database, and things are running a lot more smoothly,” said Drew, who is also a former vice-president finance and services for the RSU.

Still, it has been a costly ordeal.

After the server crashed in mid-September, the RSU sent several boxes of receipts to a data-entry company, with a price tag of about $5,000. What’s more, the RSU board of directors just approved $30,000 of the union’s budget to cover the new database program and new server.

And this doesn’t even include the cost of employing staff to work in the book room while it was closed to customers.

Whitfield said the book room’s higher-than-normal profits during the summer and early September will help offset the lost revenue. As well, the union has a contingency fund that will cover the money lost during the ordeal.