How to Create One Report from Two Independant Systems
Posted by Alistair Hill on Mon, Dec 12, 2011 @ 02:25 PM
I recently met with Glen Mund (President of Plus) to determine the best way to get data from our Sage ERP Accpac and Sage CRM. Accpac and CRM are two independent, but synchronised systems. All customers, vendors and their respective contact details are updated live between each. It’s an out-of-the-box solution provided by Sage. The limitation that we were up against was that the customizable nature of CRM was leaving Accpac behind.
In CRM we keep many additional details about our customers in addition to the standard details that you might find in any typical ERP. CRM is designed to be able to handle these extra details by allowing us to add extra fields to a company’s details. In this case, SIC codes. In Accpac, there is no place for a SIC code without creating an optional field. Optional fields are a powerful addition to Accpac that allows for the creation of custom containers of information, like a SIC code. Although Accpac and CRM are synchronised, you can’t expect two independent systems to be able to automatically keep up with structural changes made by the end user.
When the conversation started, we were talking about how are we going to get this piece of information reliably from CRM to Accpac. So I proposed a little piece of custom software that would check for changes in each and make the same change to the other, a common approach to address this type of functionality gap. It’s not a difficult thing to create, but like anything else, it was going to take a bit of time. However, I then asked the magic question which should have been asked at the beginning...
“Why do you want to do this?”
To which Glen responded; “I want to be able to get a sales report that groups by SIC code”
SIC codes are in CRM and sales numbers are in Accpac. It seems logical that if you want to report on two pieces of data, to put one where the other is. In this case, put the CRM data in Accpac.
But wait! There is an easier solution! Just because data exists in two different places, does not mean we can’t combine them into one report. Using any number of techniques, we can create a single report that would give all the required results in far less time than creating a tool that moves data around. Solutions like Accpac Intelligence are designed exactly for this purpose.
If you have Accpac 5.6 or 6.0, you already own Accpac Intelligence and that is a great starting point. If you have multiple sets of data that you would like to combine, let's see what we can do for you.
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