Recent Blog Posts
Sage Line 50 ODBC Explorer
OK, a couple of days later than I said (work schedule is crazy at the moment) you can download the free Sage 50 Explorer. This tool allows you to connect to Sage Line 50 data, query any of the tables and then export the resulting data to Excel or a comma separated text file.
Please note this uses the Sage ODBC driver which is read-only, you cannot change any data only extract it. However also please note the software is provided as is with no warranty of any kind implied or otherwise. If you are going to extract data to be extra safe take a backup first! Simply send an email to explorer@domorewithsage.com where you will receive a link to download the software.
In the next week or so I will be adding a couple of videos to demonstrate the product. You can additionally head over to ezinearticles.com and search for Sage Line 50 ODBC and you will find a couple of articles I have written on querying Sage data.
Category: Uncategorized
New Sage Product Launched in the UK
I blogged about this on my other blog over at Sage Line 500 regarding the official UK launch of a new Sage product called ERP X3. Now it is unclear where this product will sit in the range, probably between Sage 200 and Sage 1000 but thats yet to be confirmed, but once I do know I will let you all know! For mid-range customers this *might* offer a better fully integrated CRM and financials solution and this is touted as a fully web enabled solution.
Category: News
Sage Line 50 for iPhone?
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.
Category: Sage 50
Sage Line 50 ODBC
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.
Category: Sage 50, Small Business
Do more with(out) Sage
Maybe I should rename this blog to do more without Sage as I do more work with SaaS vendors to provide them with an easy way to migrate their prospects from Line 50 to their own offering. After Kashflow I have now done a wizard for Fusion Accounts and there are two other three other vendors who are now looking to acheive the same.
I should stress this is simply because I am passionate about SME businesses *not* the software they use to run their business. So for me it is about the software delivering maximum benefit and productivity to your business regardless of vendor.
Category: Small Business
epay for Direct Debit Processing
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:
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Why Sage may never get saas
Dennis Howlett has made an interesting post regarding the rapid release and the subsequent silent demise of Sage’s own Software as a Service (Saas) offering which you can read about in full here Why Sage may never get saas
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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Category: Sage 1000, Sage 200, Sage 50, Sage Line 500
Amazon UK selling pirated software
OK, so I don’t want this blog to become a soap-box for me to rant from, and I try and provide information which is useful and specific to the industry. However this has really angered me where Amazon UK’s so called ‘buyer guarantee’ isn’t what it appears. Three weeks ago I purchased some Adobe software from an Amazon UK marketplace seller. I strongly suspect due to the poor quality of the packagaing that the item is in fact counterfeit. Long story short rather than Amazon ‘protecting’ me and allowing me to return the item for a refund, I have to prove its counterfeit before any further action can be taken? Mind boggling! And there was me thinking that their buyer guarantee (along with the sale of goods act and the distance selling act) would enable a swift and painless refund!
Buyer beware!
Category: Uncategorized
What happened to SageLive?
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.
Category: Sage 50
When integrated isn't really integrated at all
I have just finished reading a whitepaper from a Sage mid market reseller extolling the virtues of the ‘integrated’ nature of Sage 200 suite. Essentially this product is marketed as an all in one financials and CRM package. However the truth is somewhat different.
What you have here are two completely different products that have been developed and operate on two different platforms. On the one hand you have Sage 200 financials, this is a windows application written in .Net which talks to a SQL Server database. With it you have Sage CRM MME which is a web application (for the technically minded written in a mixture of an ISAPI DLL and some classic ASP) also talking to SQL Server (but a different database to the financials).
So what you essentially end up with are two loosely (and I do mean loosely) coupled applications that only share a basic amount of information which is of limited use! What if you wanted to write to all your customers who had bought, lets say an iPhone and you had a really desirable iPhone add-on you wanted to market to them, you could then create a campaign around that, build your offer and communicate it couldnt you? Wrong! not possible as you have no financials information you can view (apart from screen popping orders and quotes from CRM) from CRM, so there you go, don’t believe the hype!
