Have a new client who uses ancient version of sage - version 11 which goes back to about 2003 from what I can make out. There are almost 300,000 entries so getting any kind of reports just leaves the software in thinking mode for AGES. Yes I know - they need to archive a lot of data and even better upgrade to a newer version - discussions in hand and need to arrange something, but in the meantime I need to get on top of the work load as its not been done for a while.
They have staff who create the invoices in sage. Then the Director updated them to 'post invoices' until end of October. Sage indicates on the invoice page that they are posted and in fact they all show in the debtors control account.
A small number of invoices are posted to credit customer accounts in a variety of names in the usual way, plus there is one additional credit 'customer' account set up for 'cash sales'.
When I come to allocate payments against customer invoices from 27 October from the Bank account option, the only invoices showing as unpaid/outstanding are the small number of credit customers. The ones in the dummy credit customer 'Cash sales' show no invoices outstanding, apart from about 5 invoices from earlier in the financial year. Also if you order a debtor report on the 'cash sales' dummy customer account the balance in the current due column is just the total of those 5 stray invoices. Yet the 'cash sales' customer account on the main page shows c £6k o/s - which is approx the value of these invoices posted 27 - 31 October. (I say approx as I havent physically added them up as it would take a while as the reports are not available in ex!)
I have checked through the main Bank and other Bank/cash register etc options to see if they have been paid in there but they have not, which I was expecting as I know no-one has keyed them!!! I even checked through the Financial option and they all show as not yet paid. I cannot get a 'customer activity report' from this customer account as sage just crashes due to the volume of entries previously and as the asge is so old I cannot customise the data of the report to restrict it! So why then are the invoices are not showing on the relevant customer account when I go to it via the Bank customer receipt option is beyond me.
Oh and by the way - when I try to get a day book report nothing is showing - which leads me to think that there is something awry with the posting, but then why would they show in the debtor control account as posted to the correct account. So what can be wrong?
The only thing that seemed to happen at the same time was the user login was 'xx' before and is now 'yy'. But Ive even logged in under 'xx' and still nothing shows.
At a complete loss - hoping desperately someone can help or suggest a workaround. Hope Ive explained it sufficiently.
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
I can't remember back to v.11 but is there an equivalent to the Financials screen which shows you all transactions and the accounts that they're posted to?
Hi Clare
Yes there is a financials screen and I can see the invoices in there and showing in the correct 'customer account' , but most definitely not paid.
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
How about bringing a backup away and interrogating in a later version of Sage 50 on an up to date machine. Particularly if the setup they use is as old as the software.
Whichever screens you are looking, check there are no active searches in play. It may well be that you aren't seeing the 27-31 Oct invoices because they are excluded from an active search.
I forget the exact mechanism in a Sage that old, or even if this guess is likely to be true - but it's something to look out for as a possible explanation!
__________________
Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Our Onion software has facilities to produce an aged debtors report as well as the main accounts analyses. In the course of producing the report it looks at what invoices have been matched fully or partially and with what. The final display can be altered to detail the status of every transaction posted to the sales ledger since the start of the previous financial year. Perhaps that might shed some light on what you are seeing? (I presume you've conducted all the normal data checks under File > Maintenance)
Onion works with Sage v8 and higher so should be OK with v11. I wouldn't expect the transaction count of 300,000 to be overly problematic (other than slowing Onion down a bit - I'd run the accounts and aged debtors analyses separately rather than at the same time). The possibility of some sort of data anomaly might be more of an issue for successful completion in a timely manner. However, the free 30 day trial means that you can see if it gets you anywhere at no cost. I'd be happy to guide you through looking at the transaction level data Onion produces in ways that might illumine your issue.
How about bringing a backup away and interrogating in a later version of Sage 50 on an up to date machine. Particularly if the setup they use is as old as the software.
RS
Hi RS
Am mid attempting to get one (see below!)
Thanks for the suggeestion
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Whichever screens you are looking, check there are no active searches in play. It may well be that you aren't seeing the 27-31 Oct invoices because they are excluded from an active search.
I forget the exact mechanism in a Sage that old, or even if this guess is likely to be true - but it's something to look out for as a possible explanation!
Hi Vince
I hadnt thought of that one - will have to give it a go when I am next in. Really frustrating I cant have a play with this one at home to try it out now! Thanks for the tip - will keep you all posted!
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Our Onion software has facilities to produce an aged debtors report as well as the main accounts analyses. In the course of producing the report it looks at what invoices have been matched fully or partially and with what. The final display can be altered to detail the status of every transaction posted to the sales ledger since the start of the previous financial year. Perhaps that might shed some light on what you are seeing? (I presume you've conducted all the normal data checks under File > Maintenance)
Onion works with Sage v8 and higher so should be OK with v11. I wouldn't expect the transaction count of 300,000 to be overly problematic (other than slowing Onion down a bit - I'd run the accounts and aged debtors analyses separately rather than at the same time). The possibility of some sort of data anomaly might be more of an issue for successful completion in a timely manner. However, the free 30 day trial means that you can see if it gets you anywhere at no cost. I'd be happy to guide you through looking at the transaction level data Onion produces in ways that might illumine your issue.
Best wishes for getting to the bottom of this.
Regards,
Hi Ian
Ive only looked through File maintenance so far. I tried to both run the data check and start the Backup process so it would force a data check so I could see if I had any error messages but the whole lot just kept crashing on me. Ive left it just trying to run the activity report overnight and if that is successful when I ring them tomorrow I will ask someone to run the data check before they leave tomorrow night so its hopefully done before I go back on Thursday.
I am trying to obtain a back up (see below for probs encountered so far) and failing all that will certainly put your suggestion to the owner on Thursday. I certainly appreciate the offer of using the free trial and even more so the handholding as Im a hopeless technophobe, which probably isnt helping the position!
Thanks again Ian
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Why oh why oh why is nothing straight forward. They back up on to tape. Yep - tape!! Via a server. So I didnt want to mess with it, but spoke to the owner when he got back later this afternoon. He pointed me in the direction of their server/IT support bods who I phoned and who then asked me to put the request in an email. The latter extremely helpful support - not. Anyway I pushed the guy who almost went into meltdown when I suggested they talk me through moving the back up (just of sage and not everything) onto a USB stick, suggesting instead it be dumped onto a shared drive. So email has gone to the relevant person explaining that I need to be able to share that data with a third party, preferably via Dropbox but at the very least via a usb.......they have plenty of time to ponder on it as Ive told them I wont be back until Thursday.
Although by then the owner may be under the table crying (so he said) - and I might be joining him.
Will keep you in the loop - as soon as Im in it!
Thanks everyone so far - any more ideas, gratefully received!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
That means you'll not be able to restore a v11 backup (if you can get one) into any version between 18 and 22 without first restoring to a version between 12 and 17 and taking a fresh backup to restore to a version between 18 and 22 (not sure if a six version gap is the max or not).
Hope this helps you with the restore process.
Regards,
-- Edited by Onion4Sage on Wednesday 25th of November 2015 08:25:40 AM
Hi Ian
Thanks for this....between Michelle and I we reckoned we have very copy, well actually mostly Michelle, so hoping we can extra something from it.
Just to gear myself up for what is going to be a busy day tomorrow......what would you need to run something through your software?
I'm off the grid most of today so hoping for some more ideas if anyone has any, whilst I'm out.
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
......what would you need to run something through your software?
Hi Joanne,
You need: the correct version Sage ODBC driver installed (2002 - v8 or above); Excel 2003 or higher (not 64 bit); and, local or network access to an accdata folder containing the company data. Sage itself does not need to be installed on the machine.
I can help with the ODBC bit if you are working on a machine that doesn't have Sage - there's usually an ODBC installer (Setup.exe) in the folder C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts\ODBC32 (or some such) that you can copy to another machine and run to install the driver.
Regards,
Edit - P.S. Should have said Windows XP or higher
-- Edited by Onion4Sage on Wednesday 25th of November 2015 09:17:54 AM
A bit of a long shot. This is a cash account therefore the boss expects the items to be paid for before the invoice is raised. With this in mind he may have gone to the Payment Details of the invoice and clicked 'Payment Already Received' My recollection is that this will mark the item a paid in such a way that it does not report on an Aged Debtors, but does show up as part of the account balance in the Sales Ledger screen.
Ian's Onion software is brilliant by the way, and a bargain at the price (no he's not paying me to say that)
Hello all Still got the same problem, but at the mo client has his IT support peeps suggesting loading sage onto separate PC and doing a restore. I finally managed to get a back up and also going to try to bring that up to date to see if we can see anything. Thank you all for your suggestions so far, most tried - although the system just crashes if I try to do a 'data check'.
Ian - I havent forgotten you - have suggested you to the bossman. Just waiting for him to come back to me. Wont be in there again until next week.
John - worse was - tapes saved over each other every week so I cant even restore to just before where I think the problem lies. But having involved their external IT support bods I know at least can do my own backups as and when I feel like it, or should I say as and when sage doesnt crash or sit there staring into space for hours! lol.
I love a challenge. When I have time for one - which I just dont have right now.
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
Yes Michelle there is still room under that table.
Mahoosive thanks to Michelle for helping me get a backup from 2012 to 2014 so I can now have a look at it in my latest sage version and it will be ready for when they upgrade their sage.
Also - I finally managed, after upgrading it from v11 to v12 at home, to run a check data process which hadnt been done since Feb of this year. Found 2097 errors, plus about 750 warnings/comments. Errors as most sage users will know can sometimes require the services of Sage to fix and are sometimes known as 'fatal errors', however this morning I managed to run a 'fix' and got down to 27 errors o/s. So now I can see the late October invoices sitting in the ''c000'' customer account as o/s when I go into the Bank screen. Not sure what else will have been affected, that 'little' job is still to do. Plus I now need the company to be on shutdown, with all users logged out to be able to try to run the same routine on their version 11 sage - wish me luck, am gonna need it as need to also switch off their auto backup process so that its isnt clogging the system up. So thats a Sunday job for someone!
As far as I can ascertain the error seems to have been caused by two users using the same user logon at the same time!!!!!!
As for the rest - I need a few days with no other work - that aint gonna happen until about March 2016!
Thanks again for all your help so far. I may be back
__________________
Joanne
Winner of Bookkeeper of the Year 2015, 2016 & 2017
Thoughts are my own/not to be regarded as official advice,which should be sought from a suitably qualified Accountant.
You should check out answers with reference to the legal position
