Sage Line 500

Does your business really need Business Intelligence?

admin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:50:43 +0000

I’m not questioning anyone’s judgement here but Business Intelligence (BI) is fast becoming the new CRM (aka the emprerors new clothes). Why? Because its seems many medium and large enterprises are falling over themselves to get some form of BI implemented without really understanding what it will and wont give them. Let me give you an example, the company I am currently consulting for have chosen to buy not one, but two BI solutions but then discovered that both of these solutions, whilst eventually delivering the needs of the business, out of the box neither solution can report on the one key area of data the business needs to report on.

The reason I raise this is because we have delivered virtually all of the management reporting requirements using sql reporting services, no BI cubes in sight! Of course one of the useful things as regards GL reporting is that the periodic balances are stored in the GL master table anyway so the aggregations are done, its then just a case of splitting out by cost centre and creating views to group the account codes by sales, cost of sales, balance sheet etc.

Back from the wilderness

admin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:48:09 +0000

OK, so the posts have been a little thin on the ground but I will be picking this up again now with a raft of posts over the next few months. I have been busy in the land of Sage 1000 with product development (add-ons) and a web interface I’ll will demontsrate very shortly.

A New Challenger Enters!

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:00:44 +0000

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.

Telesales Matrix Pricing

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:16:44 +0000

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.

#3 in Google Organic Search

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:18:22 +0000

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.

New Sage Site

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:37:58 +0000

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

Version 6 Webclient

admin — Thu, 03 May 2007 08:56:55 +0000

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.

Project Hierarchies #2

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:04:58 +0000

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.

Project Hierarchies #1

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:17:38 +0000

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!

Ok so I got hit with this little problem so I needed a solution for my client! Well the first cut was a quick and dirty solution. If you are unaware of how the data is stored what Line 500 does is store the relationship but only 1 level at a time. That means a 1st level child knows the top level project, a 2nd level child knows the 1st level etc.

The problem of course is that you might want to group financials by top level projects only and have children across many levels that are not directly joined. The quick and dirty approach is simply;

SELECT
t0.project_code AS TopLevel, t1.project_code AS C1,
t2.project_code AS C2, t3.project_code AS C3,
t4.project_code AS C4, t5.project_code AS C5,
t6.project_code AS C6, t7.project_code AS C7
FROM
scheme.prpjm as t0
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t1 ON LEFT(t1.parent_project, 20) = t0.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t2 ON LEFT(t2.parent_project, 20) = t1.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t3 ON LEFT(t3.parent_project, 20) = t2.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t4 ON LEFT(t4.parent_project, 20) = t3.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t5 ON LEFT(t5.parent_project, 20) = t4.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t6 ON LEFT(t6.parent_project, 20) = t5.project_code
LEFT OUTER JOIN scheme.prpjm AS t7 ON LEFT(t7.parent_project, 20) = t6.project_code

Customer Analytics #4

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:54:08 +0000

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.