Sage Accpac Accounting Software Vancouver Blog – Unisoft

In many ways Sage Accpac possesses a love/hate relationship with its third party developers.

Let’s begin with the love…

Companies with complex accounting and operational management requirements will rarely find a software solution that fits them perfectly straight out of the box. To avoid this seeming drawback some companies will either go with industry specific products that are often poorly programmed, prone to bankruptcy and often inefficient in other areas, or make the wiser decision of picking up a well-known and sophisticated brand name product that can integrate with a variety of third party products to choose from. Accordingly, Sage Accpac ERP’s easy to develop for system architecture is arguably one of its many most attractive features for software programmers as well as for companies that are looking for reliable accounting systems that are flexible enough to accommodate their internal operation structures as they grow. With this is mind, during it’s evolution from the years of MS-DOS, Sage Accpac developers were guided to specifically program the Windows based Accpac program to accommodate third party developers. This may be attributed to the fact that corporate leaders at the time realized early on that rather than drowning in the quick sand of targeting vertical markets and thereby excluding various customer opportunities, they would instead use their growing resources to create the perfect full suite of accounting modules that can be used by all industries and incorporate in various windows and doors for developers to integrate their own industry specific products. Whatever the reason may be, this is one of the reasons Sage Accpac has thrived in an increasingly competitive market with the likes of giants like Microsoft. In other words, one of the reasons for Sage Accpac’s success in North America is because of the easy availability of third party products that integrate with it.

But we can’t forge the hate…

That being said, Sage has also succumbed to its greedier instincts and also created and acquired various add-on products for its core financial and operational modules that often come in to direct competition with its third party developers. For this reason and perhaps just because they can, Sage Accpac’s many third party developers have often been introduced beneath the shadow of Sage Software’s expanding girth. For example, at Sage Summit 2007 Sage Accpac third party developers were not given nearly as much publicity as business partners would have liked – after all, the reason Sage business partners attend Sage Summit is for the benefit of their customers, so that they can become more knowledgeable about current and future business solutions for them and third party products make up a huge part of this equation. But Sage was mainly promoting itself and although we can’t really blame them, we can certainly try!

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them

This is not to suggest that Sage and third party developers are butting heads all the time. In fact, there are only a few products that compete directly, but it is interesting to note that there is conference for Sage Accpac Third Party developers, hosted by a third party developer, rather than Sage itself, even though what is really being advertised first and foremost are Sage products! But what it comes down to in the end is that both David and Goliath wouldn’t have been famous if it wasn’t for their very public dueling relationship and in some strange and abstract way we can say the same about Sage Software and Sage Software Third Party Developers.

I wrote an article a while back about how to use the Sage Accpac data integrity check tool but did not include anything about how to analyze the reports generated from the data integrity check. As a consultant I have been asked many times from very worried customers why their data integrity check report is showing errors. In data integrity checks reports their are two different types of errors:

• Type 1 errors are data errors and need to be dealt with immediately as the represent damage or corrupted data. An example would be an corrupted data file that can’t be accessed by your data engine.
• Type 2 errors are accounting errors and can be quite normal but you should pay attention to these types of errors. An example of a type 2 error would be missing item number or order number.

It should be quite obvious to tell the difference between the two.  Again type 1 are almost alyways serious and should be dealt with immediately while type 2 can be serious but most times can be left alone or attended to at a later date. At Unisoft, we find it good practice to run the data integrity check once a month and try to fix any errors on an ongoing basis. 

Recently reviewed by The CPA Technology Advisor the 200 edition of Sage Accpac ERP 5.4 received 5 stars out of a possible 5.  The review is mid-range accounting systems and bases it’s assement on 6 categories:

1. Ease of Use/Transaction Entry – 5/5
2. Modules & Notable Features - 5/5
3. Integration/Import/Export – 5/5
4. Reporting – 5/5
5. Support/Training/Help System – 5/5
6. Relative Value – 5/5

Sage Accpac ERP got 5/5 for every category which is no surprise to Unisoft, an organization that has been dealing with accouting systems since 1989. One notable part of the review was the relative value where they stated that:

“Sage Accpac 200 ERP is an excellent product for companies that have outgrown their current software. The scalability of Sage Accpac with its three versions means that an investment in the product today will easily pay for itself over time.”

This is outstanding considering the other systems it was compared to including QuickBooks.  It also goes back to my article I wrote about outgrowing your current accounting system and moving to Sage Accpac as it is extremely scalable and according to this review, worth it’s value.