domorewithsage.com - Sage Instant, Sage 50, 200 and 1000 consultancy and high-productivity add-ons

I get to work in alot of vertical markets because of what I do. Today I was with two guys who work in and around the motor trade. We were looking at creating some software that can incentivise your existing base to increase their spend by setting ‘uplifted’ sales targets. It was something I had never seen before. So here’s how it works. You create a campaign and lets say that campaign runs for three months starting tomorrow (02/07/2008). You then select what customers you want to add to that campaign. Then using historical financial data you get the sales figures for each customer for the same period in the previous year (or go back 2,3,4 years). You then apply a percentage uplift to each customers historic sales and this then becomes their target for the current campaign. Now where it gets really interesting is you also take your current gross profit figure and then apply that to the uplifted sales figure. What this will do is tell you how much in actual revenue you will receive from each customer if they hit target.

Lets look at an example. Customer X has sales for the same period of the previous year of £100K. We use an uplift of 20% which means that customer has to hit £120K of sales during the current campaign. If our average gross profit is 30% then we make £6K if they hit target. So of course we can incentivise the customers to hit this target with some really compelling (and quite expensive) prizes in the knowledge of how much money there is to play with. And of course if they dont hit the target they dont get the prize!

The holy grail of systems. CRM is a hot topic but guess what? Integrated CRM and accounts in the Sage world is a myth. It simply doesn’t work 100%. Why because the Sage 200 suite and Sage 1000 comprise of nothing more than two products loosely coupled together. With the Sage 200 suite you get a windows based legacy application bundled with a web based application; two applications and two databases. With Sage 1000 you get a Sage Line 500 webclient (which uses Java) and the same web-based CRM (which doesnt use Java). So what happens when you want to raise a quotation for a prospect in Sage 200? There you are in the web-browser and as soon as you hit the quote button up pops the a windows application window from Sage 200! As this site is focused on business productivity and not specifically Sage productivity I am watching with interest a product called Interprise suite. It is the only completely integrated accounts, CRM and webshop on the market. The single user version is completely FREE and it is priced between Sage 50 and Sage 200. A demo can be downloaded from this site.

The completely FREE dashboard I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Is now ready for download. If your a user of Sage accounts, either Line 50 or Instant you can check out the features and get the software from this page.

The eternal question “I have just started a business, what accounting package should I use?” crops up time and time again. Now of course this site is dedicated to Sage but I do not sell Sage software, I merely help businesses achieve more with it so I have no real preference. Many start-ups go with what their accountant suggests. Of course this is good practice as it makes moving all the data to and from your accountant much easier. However if I had a pound for everytime I heard “I just want a simple invoicing program” I would have accrued a fair amount of money by now! The problem is that vendors think that by offering more features in their product it makes it more appealing….wrong! It just makes it more bewildering and complex to the untrained user. Sage Instant is a fantastic product, it just does what it says on the tin and is very cost effective. There are plenty of options in the marketplace so look around, what you after is an accounting system that allows you to remain productive so raising an invoicing should take less than 60 seconds.

I have written a ‘dashboard’ for Sage 50 which shows basic sales performance figures for your customer base as well as basic credit control information. It is going to be released in the next few weeks and will be completely FREE of charge to Sage 50 and Instant users. The biggest positive about it is that it queries the data without taking up a user licence so you can provide additonal staff with access to key information without buying additional seats!

Stay tuned!

If you’re wondering about using reporting services with Sage 200, this can easily be done. Sage 200 uses a Microsoft SQL Server to store the data now anyway so adding reporting services functionality is easy as it will either already be installed or be available to download and install from either microsoft.com or your SQL server CD.

Why use reporting services over the standard reports? For a start you can create reports that make use of additional field information in S200 (analysis fields for example), you can easily export reports to excel, CSV or PDF and you can also provide data to users who are not S200 users and save yourself the license costs in the process. A good example is an aged debt report, you could have a credit controller who doesnt actually need a user licence but give them access to a report which gives them all they need to chase money!

OK, technically it isn’t actually ‘broken’ but it is missing a small piece of functionality that more and more sites are flagging up. That is you can raise a PO and record it against a project but you cannot raise any sales orders and record them against a project. All that happens is that field where you enter the project reference is greyed out, simple fix you would think? I heard the current estimated fix date is many, many months away, o dear!

If you have ever encountered this error when using Visual Studio 2005 to build reports there is a hotfix available which should fix the problem. It is very annoying and is one of those problems that can manifest itself occasionally or multiple times in one day. You can get the fix here and you can use your passport sign-on (i.e. hotmail sign-in details) to access the download area.

The flippent answer would be one that generates a definative and repeatable return on investment! There is going to be a cost for any email marketing, whether it be the design of the layout of the email if you need to make it look enticing, or using a third party service which charges a subscription fee. Before you do anything though consider;

• How targetted are the prospects on the list?
• How well written is the copy? Are you starting with a compelling, benefit oriented headline?
• How compelling is the actual offer?

Always remember to do small scale tests first. if you have a list of 10,000 prospects why not come up with two different emails (same offer, different copy in the email) and send email A to 100, and B to another 100 and compare the results.

If you are going to use a third party service then check they offer costs on a ‘per subscriber’ and not ‘per email’ basis. If you are being charged per subscriber it means you can email the list several times for no additional cost. One great service which does that and offers a whole lot more besides is GetResponse

You may have a problem running an SSRS report and get the following error “For more information about this error, navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors”. Now chances are if it is a production report server you wont have machine access to run the report as a local administrator. So the only other option is to enable remote errors. How do you do that? Simple! Download this file and then from a command prompt enter the following;

rs -i EnableRemoteErrors.rss -s http://servername/ReportServer

Now when you run the report you should get detailed enough information to allow you to find the problem.