Sage Charity User group

When we started planning our installation of Sage MMS I looked around to see if there was a Charity User Group. A company called Intelligent Solutions mentioned it on their website, but they had no-one to run it, so things were dormant. Now, however things appear to be waking up. There's a page for the User Group on their website, though you won't find mention of the upcoming User Group meeting.

tags: Sage
charity

Rights and wrongs

After eventually logging into the sage.co.uk site (after resetting my password etc.) I was told
You do not have sufficient rights to access this page.

To gain access to this page you must satisfy one or more of the following conditions:

1.

You do not have sufficient rights to access this page
2.

You do not have sufficient rights to access this page.

You know, I think I don't have rights to access the page.

More on the Charity Finance Directors' Group's IT Conference:
Michael Jackson from Sage gave the opening speech on lessons that charities can learn from the commercial world. He spoke for 15 minutes when he had a 45 minute slot...

Ian Smith from Oracle UK had more to say, particularly on "Embedding CSR (Corporate Social Responsiblity)" - their involvement in Childline for example.

The thing that stuck in my mind from the presentation was the comment "People should fit their process around the software". The reason he gave was that if you have people using standard software then upgrades are cheap, because you don't have to upgrade all the little customisations that have been built in. I think he's talking about big off-the-shelf-and-customised packages.

This does go against my programmer's brain as the user is (almost) always right, but I can see how it applies to big systems. I don't know much about the new NHS central booking system, apart from the fact that it's late, but as I said before, sometimes there are cases for not fitting in with the way that thousands of GP surgeries do their business.

On the other hand, I could go into a surgery and be told "we can't do that because the system won't let us" and get annoyed with that. I really feel tension with this point.

Maybe it comes down to cost. If you can pursuade people that its better to fit the software because it's cheaper in the long run, and you want to keep your job don't you, then they may accept it. Healthcare is pretty much free in the UK, and I would guess that GPs aren't paying for the new system, so they don't see the cost benefit in standard processes.

Sage Line 100 is, according to someone in the know, a "screen-scrape" version of the DOS Line 100. Sage MMS is an all new rewrite (though the helpfile still calls it Line 100). Despite it being based on .NET the backend is still a (shock, horror) file database. No relational database engine, just files on a network drive.

The good news is that v3 will be based on SQL server. The system is full of functionality to save space - transactions can be purged or summarised - which I've not come across. Financial data isn't that huge, but if you're using file based methods to index it then I'm sure it must matter how big your data is getting.

OK, despite the cutting edge sounding title of this blog I'd like to talk about Sage MMS. Sage MMS is a mid-level Accounting system from Sage UK.

I can't find much on the internet about it from users. Maybe the type of people who use it or support it aren't the geeky types. It's a pretty bread and butter product, installed and set up by resellers, talking to the accountants, with the IT people just used to provide the PCs and servers.

However because we're a charity we have special requirements, and also because of some of the ways we do our accounting we have other requirements that stretch the product.

So there are some things to write about, but another time...

Back to the earth with a bump. We've purchased Sage MMS. The previous version (Line 100) was a screen-scraped DOS product. This latest version is .NET based, but no relational database at the back-end yet - just shared files on a network drive.

Still NASA doesn't exactly use leading edge technology.