Recent Blog Posts
Other Accounting Systems
Tools for YOUR accounting system
After the popularity of the FREE tools now its time to look after the needs of non-Sage users. Shortly available will be the dashboard and explorer tool for Quickbooks.
Category: Uncategorized
Sage 50 ODBC Explorer
Sage 50 ODBC Explorer
This FREE tool will allow you to access and extract information from any Sage table. If you are proficient in SQL you can extract exactly the data you need. If not simply double click any of the listed Sage tables to view all of the data.
The ODBC explorer allows you to export Sage data to MS Excel or CSV format.
You can get your copy by sending a blank email to this address
If you want SQL training then please contact me.
Category: Uncategorized
Sage 50 Dashboard
FREE Sage 50 Dashboard
Get instant information on your key performance indicators. To get your FREE copy simply send an email here.
Category: Sage 50
Sage 50 or Sage 200 data online?
I’ve been working on a couple of projects to extract data via scheduled jobs to place on remote servers of late. It was something I was mulling over as the one big sticking point with the iPhone connect for Sage 50 application is for a user being able to configure their firewall to allow external access. My thinking is to charge a nominal monthly fee (and no upfront cost) for a tool which extracts your Sage 50 or Sage 200 (in an extremely efficient manner!), uploads it to a secure site where you will able to view/filter and report on your Sage data.
What I don’t know is how much do you, the great Sage using population, want the ability to do this? It means not only can you easily deploy your information company wide but also to home workers and it would tie up nicely with the iphone app. Now phase 1 would be read-only but later phases would look at altering the online data and via some other tool allowing those changes to be written back to your data.
If it is something even of passing interest then please email here.
Category: Uncategorized
iPhone connect for Sage 50 Video Demonstration Available
I get asked questions about the Sage 50 for iPhone application so decided to do this short video which covers the basic operation of the application. You can check it out here.
Category: Uncategorized
Site is on the move…
The old site domorewithsage.com will soon be no more. Hopefully if you visited that site it has brought you here. At the request of Sage PLC I was infringing on the trademark name of Sage which appeared in the domain name. Sage have been graceful enough to allow me a reasonable length of time to minimise the effects of moving to this new site.
It is business as usual for all your Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage 1000 (or Line 500) and iPhone related wants, issues, queries, integrations and data migrations.
Category: News
Do you have field staff?
Well my first iPhone application has now passed approval and is available on the app store, you can find out more here. This is a great little app for viewing your customers/suppliers/products as well as sales and purchase orders. It will work anywhere, even if you are in an area that doesn’t have wi-fi or 3g. The app is a viewer only but what I am finding now talking to business owners is that they want to equip field/remote sales staff with the ability to enter orders. The iPhone doesn’t lend itself to any volume of data entry but the soon to be released iPad certainly does and this now becomes a viable proposition.
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.
Category: Sage 1000, Sage 200, Sage 50, Sage Line 500, Small Business
Mobile Sage and iPhone Development
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.
Category: Sage 1000, Sage 200, Sage 50, Small Business
Sage Explorer and Dashboard
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.
Category: Sage 50, Small Business
Happy Xmas and a Prosperous 2010!
Just a note to all customers/prospects/blog readers I wish you all very happy xmas and very prosperous 2010! My thoughts for 2010 are Sage will need to start innovating at the entry level (Sage 50) or face further slow erosion of their customer base to the plethora of online software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Sage 50 will change very little until 2012 with the advent of the MySQL version. For technical people it maybe a step forward but for the typical user it wont make much difference. Sage 200 continues to do very well in the mid-market, in fact I have been offered more work for 200 than any of the other products. Sage 1000 (Line 500 + CRM) slowly evolves with Sage now de-coupling CRM from Line 500 to give customers the choice of which CRM to use. Sadly it will still be a poorly integrated affair comprising of two completely separate products. That said there is little competition in this market space, only perhaps dynamics but even that is comprised of two different products.
Category: News
