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.

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!