Sage Accpac Accounting Software Vancouver Blog – Unisoft

Join us for the Sage ERP Accpac 6.0 Experience on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 in Vancouver, BC.

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Sage ERP Accpac has been a smart choice for the management of your business. It provides best-in-class products that allow you to extend the reach of your business. Join us at this seminar to see how the latest release, Version 6.0 will help you further expand your business horizons. You will see a live demonstration of the new functionality, including how you can:

• Enable collaboration, mobility and interoperability
• Improve productivity
• Envision success
• Get the information you need, faster
• Accelerate growth and lower total cost of ownership
• Save time on month-end processes

Click here for more info or here to register

Sage North America is part of The Sage Group plc (LON:SGE); a leading supplier of business management software worldwide. Sage North America began not as one company, but as the efforts of many entrepreneurs who built their successful products and businesses with sincere focus on their customers. Today, Sage represents the culmination of that combined entrepreneurial spirit, drive and vision.

For more than 30 years, companies that have joined the Sage family have assisted small and midsized businesses with a wide range of business management applications and services. With roots reaching back to the 1970s, Sage has grown and developed to meet the evolving needs of our customers through a combination of internal product development and acquisition.

Currently Sage supports more than 3.2 million customers in the U.S. and Canada. Sage’s sole focus is to provide business management software and services to small and midsized businesses. Sage applications cover a full range of business requirements including accounting, customer relationship management, contact management, human resources, warehouse management, specialized industry needs, among many others.
Sage’s parent company, The Sage Group, plc, is a world-leading supplier of accounting and business management software to small and midsized businesses. Sage’s purpose is to help our customers run their businesses more effectively, helping them to gain greater insight into their business activities and providing them with lasting benefits by automating their business processes.

Important Facts about Sage:
1. More than 3.2 million North American business customers currently rely on Sage Applications
2. reported US$2.24 billion in revenue in 2010
3. 25 years in existence and with 13,400 employees worldwide
4. provider of business management software and services to over 6.3 million small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) worldwide
5. 28,000 business partners and 40,000 accountants’ club members
6. 27% of profit invested into continued product development

Read more about Sage at www.sage.com.

What is included with Accpac Intelligence?

One free Report Manager License that allows the user to run 12 standard reports, author new reports (organize, create and edit), filter and aggregate data based on  based on existing data containers and available fields only.  This license can only connect to one company database at a time.

What limitations apply to the FREE Accpac Intelligence solution that is being bundled as part of Accpac 5.6 release ?

• Can connect to any number of Sage Accpac ERP companies but only one company at a time.
• Cannot connect to non Sage Accpac ERP databases (requires the Connector Module)
• Cannot add additional fields to standard reports that are not already provided by the data containers (requires Connector Module)
• Cannot perform multi-company consolidations (requires the Connector Module)
• Cannot create reports off modules and/or fields that are not available in the standard data containers (requires the Connector Module)
• Cannot schedule reports to run automatically (requires the Connector Module)
• Cannot import reports created from other Sage Accpac Intelligence installations (requires an additional Report Manager and/or Connector Module)
• Cannot run OLAP or cube reports (requires the Analysis Module)

Earlier this year, Sage notified all Payroll Update Plan (PUP) subscribers that after the 2010 tax year, Sage ERP Accpac Version 5.4 will no longer be supported. This change is particularly important because it means no additional tax updates will be made available after the 2010 tax year.  Your customers will need to ensure that their PUP subscription is current in order to continue receiving compatible updates and upgrade to Version 5.5 or higher.

The last Sage ERP Accpac 5.4 Payroll Tax Update for Canadian Payroll and US Payroll will be January 1 st, 2011.  Based on recent customer feedback, this particular update will be a full update that includes updated forms as well as tax table changes provided for 2010 tax filing.  Due to “last minute” updates issued from certain US tax authorities towards the end of the 2010 calendar year, there is a possibility for a January 31 st, 2011 Tax Update or hot fix for the 5.4 US Payroll Tax Update only.

There will NOT be a 5.4 Payroll Tax Table Update for March 2011, July 2011, September 2011, December 2011 or going forward.

Going Lean and Green with Document Management for Sage Accpac ERP 

How much money did your company spend on paper last year? How much on storing that paper? How much time do you spend searching for documents? 

Document management solutions encompass the electronic capture, retrieval and processing of documents, and have seen a surge in adoption, fueled both by the necessity of today’s volatile business environment as well as the corporate benefits gained by being socially responsible and environmentally conscious. 

With an integrated solution such as doc-link™ by Altec, documents can be accessed from within Sage Accpac ERP, eliminating the need to go back and forth between two solutions and minimizing disruptions.    

 

Reduced Costs	Storage, handling, reproduction of lost document and purchasing of fireproof cabinets add up quickly.
Minimize Your Environmental Impact	Decreased paper consumption = less trees cut down, less fuel burned in deliver, less ink used, less of everything…
Increase Workflow Efficiency	Do you often find yourself leaving your desk to sort through a file cabinet on the other side of the office just to find a document? Then having to type out part of that document so that you can pass on the information? You and your staff will save time retrieving, processing and passing information along.
Reduced Risk	Your files are kept safe, not only through limiting access but also from misplacement, loss, fire and flood!
Remote Access	For those employees on the road, working from home or in satellite offices.

  Going green leads to getting lean, which makes good sense (cents). 

 “Manage the Process… NOT the Paper”
doc-link™ an Integrated Document Management for Sage Accpac ERP 

Next Webinar: 10 am on September 15th, 2010

  To register for the webinar or for more information please call or email: Scott Smith | 604-926-3398 | Scott@Unisoft.net. 

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.

As the use of email is now the sole form of business communication for many businesses it is highly recommended that businesses use an email disclaimer.  This protect your business and help to esnure the privacy of emails. There are many sites that provide sample disclaimers that can be easily put to use. There are also applications to ensure every email has a disclaimer attached. I also think this adds a level of professionalism to your emails that can help build a trusting relationship with your customers. 

Today TPAC (Third Party Advantage Conference) 2007 started today with the preconference. Unisoft attended Norming Software Intl training sessions on Norming eTimesheet and Norming Asset Management. Norming Software Intl is based in Beigjing and has produced a number of third party products that integrate with Sage Accpac ERP. 

Norming eTimesheet is a web based job planning, time and leave tracking, expense reporting and billing software suite that the fully integrates with Sage Accpac ERP. It also integrates with almost any other accounting system through it’s integration component. The technology is built on Microsoft’s .NET framework and has can use a number of database engines including MS SQL, Pervasive and Oracle. We look forward to hearing more from the Norming team. This was a great start to the Sage Accpac third party products and really shows the depth and flexibilty that can be achieved Sage Accpac ERP trhough the third party solutions giving business owners a complete end-to-end ERP system.  

Unisoft will be attending the Sage Accpac third party conference or formally Third Party Advantage Conference (TPAC) from August 26th to 28th.  TPAC is a conference showcasing thrid party products that work with Sage Accpac ERP. The conference was founded in 2003 after the AOC, the old Third Party conference was discontinued.  All the major Sage Accpac third party developers will be there and will be a good time for Unisoft to get up to date on all their latest technologies and developments. There will be training sessions and exhibitions that will allow Unisoft to help find the best products to help improve our customers business systems. We will be posting back here after the Conference to give a quick summary of what of the Accpac conference.

This is a quick tip for Outlook users. If you have deleted items and then removed them from your deleted items folder in outlook there is a way to retrieve these items. All you have to do is locate the menu bar item named “Tools”, expand this and click “Recover Deleted Items…” and that is all. This only works for users using Excahgne 2003 and later versions with Outlook 2003 and later versions.  The number of days items are recovered from are set on your Exchange server.