Why won’t my Sage software work?

Fred is having a bad day. He left work on Friday with a check list of all the things he needed to do in his Sage software on Monday morning.

When he arrived in to work on Monday morning bright and early, he discovered that their IT system had been upgraded over the weekend.

At first, Fred was all excited when he noticed that he had a brand new PC – he had been complaining about his 6 year old PC for ages.

Fred’s excitement turned to horror when he noticed that he couldn’t access his Sage system. What on earth could be the problem?


The moral of the story – check with us BEFORE you upgrade your IT systems. Buying a new PC with Windows 7 may seem harmless, but unless your Sage software supports Windows 7, then you will experience problems.


Quick Checklist of Windows 7 compatibility:

Sage 50 Version 2010 or later
Sage 200 Version 2009 Service Pack 3 or later

Please note that Sage Line 100 and MMS are NOT Windows 7 Compatible.
For more information on Microsoft Operating System Life Cycle, please click here:


http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/lifecycle

Contact us if you have any queries in relation to Sage and IT compatibility:

Telephone: 01 8223200
Email: support@advent.ie

Gold all the way......

Advent and Sage on track as Liam Mullaney (MD, Sage Ireland) and Ray Ryan (MD, Advent) pass the Olympic Torch (replica!). Now all they need is a good pair of runners and some proper gear and they will be all set for Rio 2016!

Advent/Sage Golf Day Out

All of our prayers were answered when we arrived in Rathsallagh Country House Hotel and Golf Club to see a beautiful blue sky and warm sunshine –  perfect conditions for our customer Golf Day.

After a lovely breakfast in Rathsallagh House followed by a presentation on Sage CRM, we headed off to the tee box. The course was fantastic – challenging but very enjoyable. After a long first nine holes, we were glad of the pit stop on the 10^th hole where we had some refreshments - giving us the chance to work on our strategy for the back nine!

We arrived back into the club house to a lovely dinner. We presented the prize to the winning team captained by our own Bill Moran – well done to Bill, Gay Byrne, Ed O’Doherty and Larry Kiernan.

Thanks to Sage Ireland who co-sponsored this event and thanks also to Ryan Reid, Frank Kelly and Joe Hurley for joining us on the day.

Ah, that's better!!

 

Can I borrow your buggy??!!

That food smells great!

18 holes later and still smiling!

Right guys, what’s our strategy for back 9?

The winning team - no wonder they are smiling!

Well done Ryan, Al and Gerry

Nearly there.....

Project Data Everywhere.............

Does this sound familiar?...........

Project Manager: Hi Mary. Have you all the project related purchase invoices entered into the accounts system yet?

Mary: Nearly finished. I should have them entered by the end of the day.

Project Manager: Have you got the list with the new project codes? Can you try to remember to put the new codes on the invoices? I got a mixture of old and new codes last month and it took ages to sort it out.

Mary: No problem. I will make sure to use the new list.

Project Manager: Hi Mick. Have the guys on site submitted their timesheets for last month yet?

Mick: I haven't got them all yet. I am waiting on some of the guys on site to email them in. The usual culprits are late again. I'll chase them up. I have most of the spreadsheet complete for the ones I got.

Project Manager: Make sure to use the new job codes I sent you. I spent ages last month re-assigning job numbers.

Mick: I never got that email.

Project Manager: I'll sent it again.

Mick: I'll try and have the timesheets entered on the spreadsheet by tomorrow evening. It might be a good idea to look for timesheet entry system where the lads can enter them over the internet. It would save a lot of time.

Project Manager: Hi Kate. Have all the expense claims been submitted by the guys on site yet?

Kate: Almost, they are due to be paid at the end of the week so we should have them all by today or tomorrow. I'll code them and put them on my spreadsheet and email it to you.

Project Manager: I have a project status meeting on Friday afternoon. I have to gather all the info together and let Mary know what to bill and then calculate the profitability of each project by then. I think I will be staying late on Thursday night. Whats new?????

Kate: Good luck with that. Rather you than me.............

Has your organisation got project related information in many disparate places that need to be pulled together periodically in order to report on the progress of these projects? Is there timesheet data in one system, cost information in an accounts system, budget information in a spreadsheet, expense information in another? How long does it take to pull this information together and analyse it in a meaningful way? Are your projects profitable or is spend exceeding budget?

Sage 200 Project Accounting allows you to centralise this information. The advantages of this are:

• Project accounting is fully integrated with sales ledger, purchase ledger, nominal ledger, sales order processing, purchases order processing and stock control.
• Employees can be setup and their timesheets and expenses can be entered directly into Sage, with the cost of their time assigned to each project and cost code.
• An organisation specific project structure can be designed.
• Template projects can be set up to reduce the time spent in creating new projects.
• Projects can include sub-projects and the information can be combined.
• Phases can be built into the project structure.
• Budgets can be assigned at project, phase and cost code level.
• Projects can be have analysis codes assisgned to enable analysis of revenue, costs, profitability and variances in a meaningful way.
• A suite of reports and enquiries exist to allow the organisation to report on costs, revenue, profitability and variances from budget.
• Phased billing.
• Time and Materials and Fixed Price billing.
• Centralised data entry, reducing the chance of duplication and mis-posting, thus improving accuracy.

 It is also possible to have your employees enter timesheets and expenses over the web using the Sicon WAP modules. This information is updated to Sage 200 Project Accounting on a realtime basis.

Sage 200 Project accounting could greatly benefit your organisation if the company operates internal or external projects. Why do things the hard way?

 

When does pruning stop and growth begin?

Some wise person once said that a business is a bit like a tree. If you are not growing, then you are dying.

When you think about it, it’s true. It is difficult to stand still in the one spot and keep holding on to what you’ve got. Before long, we will begin to notice competitors passing us by and we may then wonder what we could have done better.
 

For many businesses their life-blood is their customer base. It makes sense to look after your existing customers as there is no substitute for bad customer service. Providing great customer service results in happy customers who in turn are more likely to refer your business to other potential customers. Happy customers also buy more products and services.


In a recent survey by IDC commissioned by Vodafone, “80% of SME’s stated that improving customer relationships was one of the key challenges, with 81% of workers stating that customer service is a top priority”. Now more than ever, SME’s are looking to differentiate their businesses on customer service.


I would highly recommend reading Raving Fans if this topic is of interest to you.

Providing excellent customer service is one great way of growing your business. But the key to providing excellent customer service is having the right systems in-house to manage it.

Let me explain using a simple example:

Let’s just say that you sell food products to supermarkets……

You receive a call from your biggest customer to complain about a problem with a delivery, which never arrived but which was nevertheless invoiced to them. What’s more, the prices on the invoice were all incorrect and not as agreed. This customer has only been with us a few months and this is the second time that there has been a problem with the delivery.



Where do we start? We have a problem with despatch, accounts and sales (pricing). Here are a few quick suggestions…


1. Record the details of the issue so that you can acknowledge receipt of the query back to the customer.


2. Ensure that the call is allocated to the appropriate person/team/people within the company to deal with the customer query.


3. Record and track all communications around this call, so that at any stage, you can see what’s been happening with the query and you can re-assure the customer that their query is being addressed.


4. Have easy access the Sales Order, Despatch, Invoice and Pricing details to see where the problems lie.




In this scenario, there was a lack of “joined up thinking”.
Accounts, Sales & Despatch were not aware of what each other was doing. They may also not have been aware of the issue with a previous delivery.


Using software such as Sage 200 with a fully integrated Customer Care module will help you to log, track and monitor customer service queries, response times, type of queries etc. You will know which accounts are on-hold, what the despatch status is, what prices were quoted, what the balance on the account is and what the query/issue history is for a particular customer. You can also see a full communications history against the customer’s record.


If we find out that our quest to achieve excellence in customer service is being hindered by internal processes, specific departments or people, or communications not being shared throughout the company, then we can address the problem and monitor the results as we continue to strive for excellent customer service and ultimately business growth…..

Month End's made easy, by Brian Doherty

Do you have to produce management accounts quickly and for various stakeholders in various formats? Are you transcribing data from your accounts package to other systems or into excel spreadsheets? How long are you spending doing this task? Are you concerned that that the links in your spreadsheets may not be 100%?

Software systems such as Sage 200 offer a number of options to alleviate the pressure at Month End time. Sage 200 for example, uses a report category, attached to the nominal code, to build the Financial Statements. The Sage 200 Financial statements begin as a blank canvas and through an intelligent use of the report category, various Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet layouts can be produced.
It’s so easy to do and saves lots of time messing about with spreadsheets. You can produce reports such as:

1. month actual versus budget with a variance column.
2. Year actual versus budget with a variance column.
3. month on month analysis and comparisons.
4. prior year month/year to date versus current year month/year to date.
5. quarterly results can also be reported.
6. or any combination of the above.


The flexibility of Sage 200 means that you can either build your multiple financial layouts within Sage 200 or you can use the Business Intelligence module, which comes as standard with the software. This is a great tool which allows you to drag and drop the data into the format you require – similar to using a Pivot Table in Excel ®.

Why add extra pressure at month end time? Your financial software system should be there to make your life easier – not to add to your workload. You may find that the tools are already there, but maybe you haven’t asked “is there a better way?". It is worth looking into as it could save you a lot of valuable time.

The Importance of backing-up your data...

A nightmare scenario for an organisation is to realise in a disaster recovery situation that they have not been backing up their databases or that the data they are backing up is corrupt in some way.


This could lead to re-entering weeks or months of transactions and reconciling the data retrospectively. This is a very time consuming, tedious and costly exercise and I am sure that nobody would like to be in this situation.

Here are a few tips that you may wish to consider…..

1. Ask your Hardware/IT provider to ensure that the relevant databases are being backed up correctly.

2. For Sage 200/CRM, the SQL databases should be backed up using a SQL agent. A SQL agent should back up the data in the correct manner.

3. If you create a new database, ensure that this database is included in the scheduled back-up routine.

4. For software that is not using a SQL database (e.g. Sage 50, Line 100 and earlier versions of Sage MMS), I would recommend that your database files are included in your scheduled back-up routine. For Sage 50 users, I would always recommend that you still run the Sage 50 back-up routine from within the software in addition to the scheduled back-up.

5. In a recovery situation, you will need to revert back to the last valid back-up. I can’t tell you how many times we have come across situations where back-ups are missing or the data is corrupt or incomplete. My best advice is to create a test database and periodically restore a back-up of the database to test that the back-up actually worked.


We can offer this service if you would like us to test your restored data for you.


The important point to consider is how much risk you are putting your business in by not having proper back-up and test restore procedures in place. What would be the cost to your business if you needed to manually back-date transactions for 1 month, 2 months, 6 months etc….

My advice is not to delay – make sure your back-ups are healthy and that you are not leaving your business exposed in any way. A little careful planning can save a lot of headaches.