Monthly Archives: June 2015

Accounting and ERP Vendor Apologizes? Sage Email to Sage 50 Payroll Direct Deposit Customers

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A client that uses Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree) sent us an email from Sage. It turns out that Sage switched from one direct deposit product to another and it caused some issues. Here’s the first part of the email:

The Sage Leadership team wants to talk to you.
On June 11, 2015, we implemented Sage ID, a sign-in system with enhanced security that replaced Sage Passport. While many customers have migrated successfully, some customers have experienced issues, making it difficult to process direct deposits. If you had challenges or were not able to process direct deposit, we are extremely sorry and would like the opportunity to apologize to you personally.

I’ve never seen this before, but it made me feel good about Sage; the Sage 50 product still isn’t the bees’ knees, though.

Businesses Still Integrating Legacy Systems – Sage ERP Study

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Sage recently conducted a study of top priorities for ERP customers. Sixty-five percent (65%) rated integration of legacy systems into financial systems for a single view of  their data as a top area for new investments.

Data Integration on Metal Gears.This also lines up with many of the projects we are doing today. Businesses that have data in various best-in-class systems increasingly want the data in one place. Salesforce provides their CRM, but they need key customer data like invoices, statements, shipment dates, and warranty claims available  in Salesforce. At the same time, many of these businesses are re-keying order data when they close deals in Salesforce.

Salesforce provides an API that programmers can use to pull data from Salesforce and push data to Salesforce. Programming for this interface makes data flow seamlessly from Salesforce to your other products such as shipping, ERP, and invoicing applications.

But our work isn’t just with Salesforce. Product descriptions, pictures, information from websites, and data collected in Excel, ACCESS, legacy systems, and SQL can also be easily integrated using today’s tools.

Give us a ring for more information on the integration we’ve done lately.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV: Cycle Counting with SKUs

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Let’s suppose that you have an implementation of Dynamics NAV and you want to use cycle counting. Cycle counting allows you to organize the periodic counting of inventory so that more important items or more costly items are counted more frequently. It basically maintains a record of when you counted an item last and when you need to count it next.

 

Since we have a client that’s been implementing cycle counting without warehouse management, I’ve located a few interesting things that aren’t obvious from the documentation. In fact, the easiest way to find what was going on was to look at the code itself.

Here a few notes:

  • In order for an item to show up in the Calculate Counting Period window, it’s Next Counting Period Start and End Date range must include the work date. The item will not show up for counting outside this range. In NAV 2015, you could filter the item list on the Next Counting End Date to find items that you had missed. You can also recalculate the counting period from the item list. This means that once you miss the counting period of an item, the item will not show up again unless you change the work date or recalculate the counting period.
  • If you have SKUs, these are treated as separate items and must have their own physical inventory counting period set in the SKU. Otherwise, these items will not show for selection in the Physical Inventory Journal.
  • In order for an item to show up for counting at all, some type of transaction must have occurred at the location. Suppose that you set up a new location. Unless you have some sort of transaction like transfer in, receipt, shipment, etc. the location will not be selected for physical inventory.

I am sure there is more to mention, but that is all that occurs to me now. Give us a ring if we can help with your issue with Dynamics NAV.

A Few Tips on Tech Things

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In the last couple of weeks, we’ve installed a new virtual server. I learned a long time ago that it’s much cheaper to install new hardware while the old hardware is still working fine.

We made a couple of interesting changes since the last time we installed a new server. First, we used Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 . This is a server that is available as a free download (well, sort of free; you can’t really do much with just this installed; you’ll need another license of Windows). Here’s an article that explains more. This version of Windows is only a command line (with a menu of common things that you might need to do like changing Windows update settings, the name of the machine, and the configuration of network cards). Everything else you’ll have to do from a command prompt or from another machine running a management console.

So far, the new machine is screaming fast and very easy to manage remotely.

If you decide to go this route, you might need some instructions on how to format a disk from the command line. Here’s a nice post for that.

 

We’ve also been playing around with various installations of Linux these days. All in all, I’m reminded of the discussion I have about flour in the supermarket. It seems to me that all flour should be the same; according to my wife that’s not true. All flour is not flour. Unfortunately for me and my understanding of baking things, all sugar is evidently sugar. Anyway, all Linux is not Linux. Even all Debian Linux is not Debian Linux. With all the options, packages, and dependencies, it can take a while to get most anything to work on Linux.