does anyone have any experience of linking zope and sage (the accountancy software)? first some background: a potential new client has an existing website. they are a small book publisher, with about 100 books that they sell. their website has all these as individual static pages. they are looking to expand their line of books, and to add more value to the website. so i've recommended zope as it would be perfect for what they want to do. i'm proposing putting all their book details into a MySQL database, rather than having static pages. all fine so far. now the client has come back to me and asked about purchasing online (the existing site has a system where you can send a 'shopping list' to the publisher and they send you an invoice). they want to do purchasing online *but* they need it to connect with their copy of Sage. this is so a purchase can go directly into their Sage system and not be transfered across by hand etc. i have no idea about Sage and the Sage website talks about its own solutions. anyone got any ideas/helpful hints? cheers matt
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I have some experience with Sage - but it may be out of date.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
participants (2)
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Matt Carey -
Philip Kilner