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.

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.