Archive for the ‘Sage 200’ category

Mobile Sage and iPhone Development

February 4th, 2010

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.

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Posted in Sage 1000, Sage 200, Sage 50, Small Business

epay for Direct Debit Processing

August 4th, 2009

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:

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Posted in Sage 200, Sage 50

Why Sage may never get saas

July 7th, 2009

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!

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Posted in Sage 1000, Sage 200, Sage 50, Sage Line 500

When integrated isn’t really integrated at all

June 1st, 2009

I have just finished reading a whitepaper from a Sage mid market reseller extolling the virtues of the ‘integrated’ nature of Sage 200 suite. Essentially this product is marketed as an all in one financials and CRM package. However the truth is somewhat different.

What you have here are two completely different products that have been developed and operate on two different platforms. On the one hand you have Sage 200 financials, this is a windows application written in .Net which talks to a SQL Server database. With it you have Sage CRM MME which is a web application (for the technically minded written in a mixture of an ISAPI DLL and some classic ASP) also talking to SQL Server (but a different database to the financials).

So what you essentially end up with are two loosely (and I do mean loosely) coupled applications that only share a basic amount of information which is of limited use! What if you wanted to write to all your customers who had bought, lets say an iPhone and you had a really desirable iPhone add-on you wanted to market to them, you could then create a campaign around that, build your offer and communicate it couldnt you? Wrong! not possible as you have no financials information you can view (apart from screen popping orders and quotes from CRM) from CRM, so there you go, don’t believe the hype!

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Posted in Marketing, Sage 200

Reporting Services with Sage 200

June 2nd, 2008

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!

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Posted in Reporting Services, Sage 200

Project Accounting is ‘broken’

May 28th, 2008

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!

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Posted in Sage 200