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.

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.

I get alot of requests on how to extract data from Sage Line 50. It always revolves around using the supplied ODBC driver which gets installed along with Sage. However I have taken things a step further and developed what I call ‘Sage 50 Explorer’. This is a visual tool which uses the ODBC driver and allows you to query the data in any Sage table, issue SQL against at and, even better, export the data from any table to a comma separated text file or an Excel spreadsheet.

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

I got approached by Kashflow to write a tool to help prospects using Sage 50 easily transfer all their customer, supplier, nominal ledger details along with transactions ready for moving to Kashflow. Kashflow is one of the market leaders in the Software as a Service (Saas) market offering a web based accounting solution ideal for the SME. The tool is a simple wizard which works with all versions of Sage (Line) 50 and Sage Instant and guides users through the export process. Once done it automatically uploads this information to the Kashflow servers ready for use. The kashflow site is here.

You may think it strange that I would get involved in something like this but the answer is simple. I should really rename this blog domorewithsage for the benefit of your business. It is simply about helping businesses acheive the most productivity gains from whatever accounting solution they just, I choose Sage from a purely commercial point of view because it has the biggest user base.

If you want to move data in/out/across/up/down/to/from Sage then why not contact me! I spend alot of time doing work with Sage Line 500/1000 data migration and have recently developed a tool to aid with migrating data into 500/1000. More details are on my other blog here.

Well in a nutshell you now get;

• Built in diary facility
• Improved credit management
• Additional contact information can now be stored
• Communication history to assist with credit management
• Batch printing of reports

Is it worth the upgrade? Well I guess it depends how valuable those features are for your business.

If you’re a startup business and are not sure if Sage accounting is right for you well now it doesnt cost you anything to find out. You can simply do the Sage TestDrive and get a feel for the software before commiting to buy it. You can find the link here

Or you can now get a 90 day trial of the software which is available from this page here