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.

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:

Well it seems that the SaaS offering from Sage has met a premature end. Even given the amount of time to develop this and get it right (and perhaps test it?) before launch it seems to have flopped and quietly disappeared. I commented some time ago that my initial experiences of it were poor which were echoed by other users as well. But it seems a big opportunity to miss with the SaaS bandwagon rolling on and now we have SaaS providers all looking to erode the Sage 50 user-base. I have already done one data migration tool for Kashflow and now I am in discussions with another SaaS provider to do the same for them. Suits me, this is a commercial venture after all and not a Sage fan club! They may have massive market share in that sector but unless action is taken there are lots of hungry wolves snapping at their heels.

One of my users pointed out to me that the free dashboard available for download from this site currently only works with versions of Line 50 up to 2008. I have now recompiled the install package so that it will now work with all versions of Sage 50 and Sage Instant up to 2009 (Version 15). The download is available here.

If you are an existing user and you do not want to download it you can simply look for the file Sage50Dashboard.ini (located in the same directory as the dashboard application) and set the line that says ‘Version=’ to read ‘Version=15′ and it will work fine!

I often get asked if there are add-ons for a specific piece of functionality. Your first port of call should be the Sage additions catalogue. This lists a large number of add-ons in different market sectors and there could be just what you need already available. However finding the catalogue on the Sage website isn’t that straight-forward so here is the link to the PDF.

Sage Additions Catalogue

However there may be products which are not listed in additions so it is always worth googling your requirements!