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.
Archive for June, 2008
Integrated CRM and accounts
June 30th, 2008Dashboard for Sage Instant or Line 50
June 30th, 2008The 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.
How to find the best small business accounting software
June 6th, 2008The 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.
Dashboard for Sage 50
June 4th, 2008I 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!
Reporting Services with Sage 200
June 2nd, 2008If 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!
