I always make sure I’m informed of new developments in the accounting/ERP market sector. One product which has just caught my attention and is vying for market share in the mid range sector is an offering called Interprise Suite from Interprise software. There is UK, US and Australian distributorships for the product which has a very modern look and offers (it’s claimed) a fully integrated CRM with financials and web shop functionality. A review (if a little brief) is available from this site.

Lets face it the telesales module in Line 500 is pretty cumbersome (28 pages of system key configuration for a start!) and doesn’t lend itself too well to quickly entering price/quantity discount breaks. I have developed an add-on which is massively quicker to update multiple products across multiple warehouses and allows you to set up to four quantity price breaks. Additionally it can be linked to SOP price lists.

Two videos cover the basic functionality of this module. The stock maintenance video is here and the sales maintenance video is here.

If this is of interest then please contact me.

Well if you are here then hopefully you found this site via the google organic search. This site is now ranked #3 for the term ‘Sage Line 500′ second only to Sage UK. If you are a Sage Line 500 reseller wishing to advertise or you need some help to improve your own ranking then why not drop me a line to this address.

If you are looking for help for everything from Sage 50 to Sage 1000 then this site has lots of information.

http://www.domorewithsage.com

What can I say about V6 webclient? It looks alot nicer than the 5.5 version thats for sure! If you are still running 5.5 binaries yes you can run the V6 webclient with them so no hassle there. As for costings, I couldn’t comment as I never get involved with the licensing commercials.

OK so following on from the last installment I realised that whilst my quick and dirty solution would give me all the children (WBS) parts of a parent project they were still not related. So if you need for instance a report that includes financials for WBS but you only want to report at parent level then those relationships between a parent and all children need to be defined.

What did I do? I took the earlier query I had written (which was now a stored a procedure) and wrapped another stored procedure around it so that I can now get all the children and top level parents for reporting. How did I do it? Simply contact me and I’ll happily share the code! It doesn’t build the hierarchy on the fly as it takes too long to do this and do the financial sums so it runs as a job and stores the hierarchy in separate tables.

Here’s a conundrum that you may have encountered (and maybe solved!). If you are using Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) on the project ledger and you want to report at the parent project level only how do you ‘roll-up’ the WBS elements into their parents?

Well some sites get around this problem by following a naming convention for their parent and child projects. However if you don’t then you could find yourself with the difficulty of unravelling everything!

…..Click here to read more

Something I get asked is what do you do with analytics beyond the basic scoring?

Well one thing you can do is to take two or more metrics and do a joint measure. This gives you a way to further narrow down your customer base. If we look at something used in analytics marketing called a ‘Customer Value Portfolio’ we are measuring both the days since a customer bought (Recency) versus the number of purchases (Frequency). The legend below the grid shows how we work the result set.

OK a brief introduction to triggers and more importantly how I used them to overcome a formset limitation.

Triggers are events that get ‘triggered’ whenever a record in a database is updated or a new record is added to a table. From a Sage perspective it gives us control over changes made to the data and allows us control over what we do with that data.

I am currently doing a job where the only way we could deliver the required functionality was by using a database trigger. The client wanted to capture a piece of information whilst raising requisitions and have that same information available via a purchase order enquiry. The first problem was that there were no spare fields in the requisition table that could be used and using the formset editor no way of adding fields as they were all in use. What we did is to use the ‘Location Code’ field on the requisition entry screen. Now this field is actually stored in an extension table (poreqx1m) and validates the entry in this field against polocsm. The trigger was actually used to write the value from the poreqx1m table into the PO header table.

We have mentioned customer analytics before briefly. Still the theory is all well and good but what about actually mining the data and doing something with it. This tool has been under development for about a year and is being fine tuned. It works with any Sage product from Instant right up to Line 500. The basis being it scores and segments your customers to allow you to create targetted offers. The way you do this is to take a set of metrics and measure each customer against these metrics and then split the customers into groups of 10 or 25% (called deciles or quartiles).

This shows the ‘revenue decile’ (customers who have spent the most)

Then if we want to target customers in the top decile we can drill down from the chart and get those customers.

These customers could be either mail-merged or bulk emailed with a specific offer. You will also notice in the data we have the total spend the customer has made with us, the average order value and the number of days since they last ordered (from when this extract was run).