I have just spent the weekend on a gruelling (but a very rewarding) 3 day iphone development bootcamp, big thanks to the instructor Charles (http://www.perculasoft.com/). My first project is to make available all common Sage information on the iPhone. Essentially the project will comprise of two parts; First a small stand-alone web server gets installed on one of your computers and this handles all the requests as well as paging data so you are not waiting for long for the data and secondly the application on the device itself which will give you access to sales, purchase, stock and nominal information.
If this is something of interest I am looking for beta sites (5 in total) who have a need to deliver their Sage information remotely and who will receive their iphone apps and the server portion completely free. If you want to take part simply contact me via the email link on the About page.
Initially I will target Line 50 but as soon as the first build is complete I will be working with 200 and 500/1000 also.
As I get many requests daily for both of the above products (which if you havent grabbed them are free) I do get the occassional problem reported back to me. Either product will work with any version of Sage Line 50 or Sage Instant. The programs work by using the read-only ODBC driver that gets installed along with Sage. Now typically any problems with either program will come down to not being able to find a file called ‘COMPANY’.
This file will reside typically in one of two places. For versions upto 13 (Sage 2007) it will be in
C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts
For versions 14 and beyond it will typically be in
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sage\Accounts\<version> where version will be 2008, 2009, 2010 etc.
Why is this important? Simply because it is the company file which contains the path to where the Sage data files reside. If this file cannot be found you are on to a non-starter.
So if you are having problems look for a .ini file which will be in the same directory as either application. You can open this using notepad and make sure the homedir= value is set to one of the above directories, or if you have a non standard install then try and locate the file and specify the directory where it resides.
One small further note regarding version numbers. Sage decided to drop the old versioning system of numbers (yeah I know it worked fine) and adopted the (daft) Microsoft strategy of using the year of release as the version. So version 13 became Sage 2007, version 14 became Sage 2008 etc etc. So if you are running version 2010 then the version needs to be 16. For the dashboard the installer hasn’t been updated to include this version but again the .ini file has a setting called version= which can simply be set manually.
Just a note to all customers/prospects/blog readers I wish you all very happy xmas and very prosperous 2010! My thoughts for 2010 are Sage will need to start innovating at the entry level (Sage 50) or face further slow erosion of their customer base to the plethora of online software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Sage 50 will change very little until 2012 with the advent of the MySQL version. For technical people it maybe a step forward but for the typical user it wont make much difference. Sage 200 continues to do very well in the mid-market, in fact I have been offered more work for 200 than any of the other products. Sage 1000 (Line 500 + CRM) slowly evolves with Sage now de-coupling CRM from Line 500 to give customers the choice of which CRM to use. Sadly it will still be a poorly integrated affair comprising of two completely separate products. That said there is little competition in this market space, only perhaps dynamics but even that is comprised of two different products.
OK, a couple of days later than I said (work schedule is crazy at the moment) you can download the free Sage 50 Explorer. This tool allows you to connect to Sage Line 50 data, query any of the tables and then export the resulting data to Excel or a comma separated text file.
Please note this uses the Sage ODBC driver which is read-only, you cannot change any data only extract it. However also please note the software is provided as is with no warranty of any kind implied or otherwise. If you are going to extract data to be extra safe take a backup first! Simply send an email to explorer@domorewithsage.com where you will receive a link to download the software.
In the next week or so I will be adding a couple of videos to demonstrate the product. You can additionally head over to ezinearticles.com and search for Sage Line 50 ODBC and you will find a couple of articles I have written on querying Sage data.
I blogged about this on my other blog over at Sage Line 500 regarding the official UK launch of a new Sage product called ERP X3. Now it is unclear where this product will sit in the range, probably between Sage 200 and Sage 1000 but thats yet to be confirmed, but once I do know I will let you all know! For mid-range customers this *might* offer a better fully integrated CRM and financials solution and this is touted as a fully web enabled solution.
You know I start lots of little projects, some end up as products, others get consigned to the bin. What I have learnt over many many years in business is that now I don’t waste much time on things unless their is a definite market of willing buyers for any prospective project. So as much as an exercise for me to learn iPhone development (and perhaps join the app store goldrush which seems to be taking place!)
I have the bare bones of, for want of a better term, a sage line 50 ‘viewer’ for the iphone. For those technically inclined I have a small php web server which reads data from line 50, packages it as XML which then gets consumed by an application on the iphone. Cool? certainly, commercially viable? unknown at the moment, if you have a few seconds spare I would be grateful if you could complete the poll on the right.
Cost wise I would probably give away the iphone application and charge a nominal fee for the server portion of the solution. In real terms it would enable you or your staff to remotely view Line 50 data (Sales, Purchase, Nominal, Stock and transactions) anywhere they could get wi-fi or a 3g signal.
I get alot of requests on how to extract data from Sage Line 50. It always revolves around using the supplied ODBC driver which gets installed along with Sage. However I have taken things a step further and developed what I call ‘Sage 50 Explorer’. This is a visual tool which uses the ODBC driver and allows you to query the data in any Sage table, issue SQL against at and, even better, export the data from any table to a comma separated text file or an Excel spreadsheet.
Best of all its, FREE and will be available early next week for download.
Maybe I should rename this blog to do more without Sage as I do more work with SaaS vendors to provide them with an easy way to migrate their prospects from Line 50 to their own offering. After Kashflow I have now done a wizard for Fusion Accounts and there are two other three other vendors who are now looking to acheive the same.
I should stress this is simply because I am passionate about SME businesses *not* the software they use to run their business. So for me it is about the software delivering maximum benefit and productivity to your business regardless of vendor.
Do you have to process payments that you collect via Direct Debit? Some years ago I developed a program called epay for Sage Line 50. epay will take the direct debit collection file that you receive from your bank, post all the cash for each account in the file and then allocate this cash to either the outstanding amount on the sales ledger account (i.e. try and match multiple invoices) or match against a single invoice. My biggest customer of this software processes 2500 direct debits monthly and it saves them approximately 1.5 days a month of manual labour. The software also provides a full audit trail and exception reports where any errors occur. You can see more in this video here:
Dennis Howlett has made an interesting post regarding the rapid release and the subsequent silent demise of Sage’s own Software as a Service (Saas) offering which you can read about in full here Why Sage may never get saas
Obviously Sage have a large legacy in the Line 50 market with some users having been happy users for years so what do you do to embrace the Internet and provide a SaaS solution? Of course the SaaS players will say the web is the future and all software will go this way. Ardent fans of Line 50 and those concerned about potential security issues still favour the traditional windows approach. The above article mentions lack of R&D funding but my thinking is whilst a product still sells commercially its hard to plough money into a new offering. No more is this evident than in the Sage Line 500/Sage 1000 products. Architecturally and user interface wise it is a disaster. Functionality wise it offers much. Bottom line is both those products still sell into the high end market-space making a radical re-write low down on the list and commercially expensive!
