Sage Announces Customer Loyalty Promotions for March

Sage announced today that as a way to reward existing Sage MAS 90 and 200 ERP customers with current ClientCare Plans (more commonly known as subscriptions). Purchasing two user licenses will net a third license at no additional cost. Also, purchasing a new module will entitle you to a second module.

Of course there is fine print. The second module is of equal or lesser cost and is good up to $1500 and maintenance fees apply to all user licenses and modules (even the “free” ones). The offers are valid March 10 – 31, 2009.

While these are good offers, the best offer is hidden: the buy one/get one free applies to Extended Solutions, plug-in applications that enhance the functionality of the modules you are already using. We just demonstrated several Extended Solutions at our last User Group meeting and you can find a list of recommended Extended Solutions here.

SageTalk and the New Sage Communities

Since Sage introduced the Sage MAS Online Community and Discussion Forum in 2008, it seemed inevitable that the popular and content-full SageTalk Discussion Forum would be retired and after the end of this month the site will become a read-only resource. No new posts or replies will be allowed but it seems that the existing information will remain in place indefinitely for reference purposes.

Although it isn’t as well-stocked as its predecessor, after participating in the new forum, you will likely come to the conclusion that it is an improvement. Messages can include images and are much easier to edit that with SageTalk. RSS feeds for the Core Modules and other sections and Twitter feeds are available, too.

Sound Advice From the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce recently published a paper outlining some very sensible strategies businesses can employ in seven different arenas “when the economy sours.” While we might argue that, at this point, if the economy has soured, following the advice provided may either pull your business out of a slump or keep it from falling into a slump in the first place.

Two of the sales strategies mentioned in the document recommend prioritizing both your sales prospects and your existing customers. We can all agree that we should exert our effort where we will realize the biggest return; after all, how many references to the Pareto Principle can you recall from prior sales training?

ACT! by Sage ships with some pretty terrific reports for prioritizing your efforts that might work for you right out of the box. By following the Reports Menu to Edit Template, you can even modify the existing reports to meet your needs or click New Template to start from scratch. By using these tools to analyze where you need to focus your sales and marketing energy, you will also be working within another of the included strategies: optimizing operations.

Report Selection Simplified

Sage Software shipped all customers on a current subscription the 4.3 release last week. There has been a lot of talk for a long time about this release such as:

• The inclusion of the most popular Paperless Office enhancements

• Integrating the Fixed Assets module with Accounts Payable and Purchase Order

• The expansion of Business Insights Explorer to include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Inventory Management and Purchase Order views

However, there is another less talked about (but maybe more anticipated) enhancement included: the simplification of report selection criteria.

No longer are users required to move to a second tab to define the criteria, but better yet is that users now have the option to keep the selection criteria window open after printing or previewing a report. That means you no longer have to navigate through the menus to run multiple iterations of a single report. It has been a long time coming.

Considering that and the fact that we’ve had some time to do our best to break the new release so it doesn’t break at the customer’s site, we’re getting excited about moving ahead with the upgrades. It’s also important to note that Sage has not yet had to release a service update for version 4.3.

Let’s hear what is exciting you about the upgrade to version 4.3 in the comments.