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.

I hope this helps resolve any issues.