If you have remote workers that perhaps need to be in close contact with your Sage accounting solution then please get in touch to see what your options are.

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.

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.

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.

Best of all its, FREE and will be available early next week for download.

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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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!

Sage Additions Catalogue

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