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.

The eternal question “I have just started a business, what accounting package should I use?” crops up time and time again. Now of course this site is dedicated to Sage but I do not sell Sage software, I merely help businesses achieve more with it so I have no real preference. Many start-ups go with what their accountant suggests. Of course this is good practice as it makes moving all the data to and from your accountant much easier. However if I had a pound for everytime I heard “I just want a simple invoicing program” I would have accrued a fair amount of money by now! The problem is that vendors think that by offering more features in their product it makes it more appealing….wrong! It just makes it more bewildering and complex to the untrained user. Sage Instant is a fantastic product, it just does what it says on the tin and is very cost effective. There are plenty of options in the marketplace so look around, what you after is an accounting system that allows you to remain productive so raising an invoicing should take less than 60 seconds.