- Posted by miketeye on March 21, 2007
Share on FacebookSage Line 50 is a very versatile accounting system used by many Small
Businesses. There are however a few areas where it falls flat and not
very helpful.
For Starters, the database is a closed database
with only a read access odbc driver support out of the box. If you want
to do any extensions to your Sage line 50, you would need to sign up
with sage for a development subscription and pay a premium every year
to have access to Sage Data Objects.
One major functinality
missing from Sage Line 50 is multi-location stock control. Which means
if you have to implement more than one location for the same product,
or multi-level stores (such as warehouse and departmental stores) then
Line 50 will certainly not meet your requirements.
My company
uses Line 50 and we have been struggling to keep up with Acknowledging
Customers and advising on expected delivery dates for their products. I
therefore decided to develop some sort of system to facilitate this
task as an extension to sage.
By and large, it has become very
attractive lately to use web applications because of the huge gains in
deployment since evrybody has a browser.
I used VB.NET and Visual
Studio 2003 for the project. To overcome the closed Sage database
problem, I used the Data management services in MS SQL server to setup
a nightly automatic copy of relevant sage database tables into an SQL
database. Considering the target system is an order acknowledgement,
day-old sales and purchase order information is not a problem, besides
copying in the night is more suitable since there are no workstations
tasking the servers resources.
I also decided to use SMTP mail
as the mode of communicating to customers and suppliers. This way,
outstanding order information can be picked from Line 50 database
tables and used to compose an email from a browser driven web app. The
composed information is emailed to the supplyer asking for EDD
(Expected delivery dates). When the reply to the email is received,
another form is run which allows for the dates to be entered against
the purchase orders.
A colour key scheme is used to manage
important orders needing urgent attention with red coloured rows being
very urgent, green rows being completed rows etc.
By and large the system seems to be working very well.