Hi Matt, In article <D11D0F8B-39C1-11D7-ABA6-000A95669874@studiolift.com>, Matt Carey wrote:
i have no idea about Sage and the Sage website talks about its own solutions. anyone got any ideas/helpful hints?
I have some experience with Sage - but it may be out of date. Here are some pointers for direction... First of all, there are zillions of versions of Sage - you need to know which one they are using, as they have very different levels of capability. There are two routes which I think would bear investigating, and one caution you may wish to bear in mind... ODBC - Some versions of Sage have ODBC access. This is primarily useful for getting data /out/ of Sage, but may have the capability to let you write the invoice straight into Sage. The way accounts s/w uses postings often makes it inadvisable / fiddly / unsupportable to write directly to the system. Import - When I was addressing a similar problem (This was with an ancient version of Financial Controller) we fond that the system could import a batch of transactions from a delimitted ascii file. Writing this file out from the POS application was trivial, and the import and processing was adequately (Hey, I don't like 'em!) supported by Sage. The caution is just about how "direct" such a link can be. Assuming Zope is running out on the net somewhere and their copy of Sage is in house, this is going to be a batch process. In the past I have met restistance to this, although eventually the idea that "better a batch process that works than a live process that doesn't" sinks in. There are approaches to stock control and display of qty. on hand to purchasers etc. that do not rely on "live" connections, and I would advocate a conservative approach to this stuff unless these guys are operating out of their own NOC...<g> Oh, Sage do have some sort of e-Commerce offering - but I wouldn't go there myself... Regards, PhilK Thu, 06 Feb 2003 11:13 GMT @ Vaio Email: phil@xfr.co.uk / Voicemail & Facsimile: 07092 070518 Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand. - Chinese saying