Sage 300 – Overnight Invoice feeds

We have recently finished a project that provided for the extraction of invoice raw data, and daily distribution to customers.

Our client is a large manufacturing company based in Sydney. They generate just over 1200 new orders daily via a custom B2B portal. These orders, once complete, generate a similar number of invoices each day. Many customers have upwards of 100 completed invoices daily! The work effort in entering these invoices manually into their respective in house ERP solutions was becoming very cumbersome.

In collaboration with relevant key customers, a solution was developed allowing for a daily extract and distribution of invoices to customers. File structure catered for both MYOB and XERO in XML and CSV formats. This allows for the import of multiple invoices – saving many manual hours of work!

An outcome that is simple, effective and of significant value…

Contact us – we are available to discuss how we can either streamline, or provide efficient solutions to your daily processing needs.

Microsoft SQL Express

Microsoft SQL Server and Sage 300 (Accpac)

Microsoft SQL Server licensing costs are often a major cost component of any proposed Sage 300 upgrade. As a result, many projects are delayed and sites left ‘in limbo’ due to an uncertain path forward.

Microsoft does offer a free version of SQL – Microsoft SQL Server Express aimed at test environments and developers, along with small production environments. It’s a fully working SQL platform, however like most free software, lacks a few advanced features.

As per Microsoft:

Express edition is the entry-level, free database and is ideal for learning and building desktop and small server data-driven applications. It is the best choice for independent software vendors, developers, and hobbyists building client applications. If you need more advanced database features, SQL Server Express can be seamlessly upgraded to other higher end versions of SQL Server.

Sage 300 will run on a Microsoft SQL Express platform, however its important to understand both the benefits and the associated limitations of doing so

MS SQL Server Express vs. Standard

The following features typically utilized with Sage 300 are included with Microsoft SQL Express:

  • Reporting Tools
  • Role Based Security
  • Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Programmability features
  • Management Tools including SQL Server Management Studio
  • Backup and restore capabilities
  • 10 GB storage per database
  • 1 GB memory capacity

While the features available at no cost are sufficient to install and run Sage 300, our team has found that the following limitations are often reason enough to justify purchase of the Standard edition license:

  • The Management and Reporting Tools are limited
  • Depending on size of data, 1 Processor and 1 GB memory may not be sufficient
  • Databases are frequently much larger than the 10 GB permitted by SQL Express
  • Does not support use of backup scripts, however there are solutions our team can implement

Contact us to discuss your requirements further. We are always happy to discuss your unique requirements and offer some real-world experience based advice to help you with your decision.