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Celebrate Your Growing Pains
Running a business presents continuous challenges. As your business grows you will need to manage that growth carefully to ensure that you can continue to grow. This will mean looking at how you go about your business, the skills of your staff and the systems you use. When your IT systems let you down they can work against your growth, not support it.
In this issue we look at some issues that arise for growing businesses, Outgrowing business software and considering alternative ways of working are common issues faced by businesses — including businesses using or considering the Online50 service. We hope you find this issue helpful, if you'd like to discuss anything please call us on 0800 195 0835.
Online50's Ambition for Growing Sage 50 Users
What Happens When You Outgrow Sage 50?
As a general purpose small business accounting system Sage 50 is the most popular choice in the UK and a sensible choice for most small businesses. However it is a general purpose product and may not be the most appropriate product for some users. In recognition of this Sage have a product range that allows users to choose a product that is most suitable for them.
When considering what accounting package to use you should consider not only what features you need, but also how much data you will need to process and how your business expects to operate. For example many users that upgrade to a larger package find that the software expects them to operate in a certain way that may not fit with their business.
Recognising this Sage announced a new product for their product range for users that were suited to their Sage 50 product but needed to process more data or use more users. In a surprise announcement last week, Sage have decided to not to release the product. This leaves users that are reaching the limits of Sage 50 with few options other than the prospect of moving to Sage 200, a much bigger product. Fortunately at Online50 we can provide Ambition Accounts which may be more appropriate for their needs.
Ambition Accounts is available in three levels to meet different needs and addresses the key areas where users reach the limits of Sage 50. As you'd expect from Online50 it's available for a simple monthly fee running on our servers or you can choose to run it in house.
Ambition uses Microsoft SQL Server, a robust and scalable system that allows Ambition Accounts to cope with large amounts of data and a high number of simultaneous users. It also provides much better support for multi-currency and stock control - two areas where users may find they need more than Sage 50.
Thanks to the way Ambition Accounts has been engineered it is available as a hosted Windows program, or a hosted Web application. As mentioned above, in common with other products from Online50 users can also choose to run the software in house if their needs change and they no longer need a professionally hosted solution. Call our Sales Desk for more information on 0800 195 0835.
Browser Based Software Or Hosted Windows Software?
The Right Tools For The Right Job
When choosing software for your business it is important that you select the right tools for the job at hand. That's why the Online50 service offers you a choice of software, all made available for you in a high performance managed environment. Our customers enjoy a choice of software that they can run in house or with us, access from anywhere and payable on a monthly fee.
Recently I was speaking to a software company that was looking at completely re-engineering some software to produce 'online' products. They spoke about the need to exceed customer expectations and how the teenagers of today do not differentiate between online software and installed software. They spoke of their teenage son who plays online XBox games with his friends as an illustration of how everything is expected to be online.
The software vendor is in danger of losing the point of being online. The very reason that their son finds the XBox game is so engaging is because it is an XBox game with high resolution graphics and sound, absorbing gameplay and the ability to play with friends online. If it was a browser based game with javascripted objects it would not be the same.
In the same way, business software needs to be the right software for the task. Browser based software can be very useful for data entry but it is not as functional as fully featured Windows software. In the same way that Excel will outperform a Google spreadsheet, most users, given the choice, prefer using a Windows interface.
All of the software we offer is available online and accessed using a web browser. We offer software that is 'browser based' but these packages are not as popular as Windows based software. Our Ambition Accounts software is available as either a browser based user interface or a Windows user interface — and it's the Windows front end which is much more popular.
Not only is the Windows interface preferred by users, but accessing remote Windows software requires less resources for the client - both in terms of processing power and in terms of network bandwidth. When using browser based software the logic for the user interface as well as any data must be downloaded to the browser, worked on and sent back. In contrast when accessing a hosted Windows application, all of the processing logic and data is held on our servers. To illustrate this we were recently visited by a vendor of some browser based software. We liked the software and we still do. However we were told that to get the 'best experience' we would have to upgrade our Internet connection. We were using one connection to the software, and at the same time from our office we had 14 connections to our Online50 service which were all operating fine with no issues. We run an Internet company and use the optimised PDSL service that we provide to customers.
Browser based software is great, and a good choice for many tasks. In our experience, offering customers the choice, most people prefer using a hosted Windows based product for their business. They get all the benefits of an online product and all the benefits of a Windows product. We offer choice because we are a service provider, we don't mind what software you use. We allow you to choose the software that's right for your business. Why not call us on 0800 195 0835 to discuss which of our choices is right for you?
Speeding Up Sage 50 Reports
Would you like your Sage 50 reports to run faster?
One of the concerns regularly voiced by Sage 50 users is the speed of reporting, especially with large datasets. The issue is caused by the way the underlying database works — it uses a large number of shared files and when used over a network access to these shared files must be co-ordinated between all users. This results in lots of separate accesses. Although we have a lot of computing power available on the Online50 platform, we cannot change the way in which the underlying software works. This means that although your Sage 50 data may run faster on Online50 there will always be room for improvement.
What's the answer?
Our helpdesk has seen that paying attention to your data can considerably improve the speed of operation of your data. You should consider whether you could use any of the following:
- Reindex your data (with File Maintenance)
- Compress your data (with File Maintenance)
- Archive your data at year end
- Clearing the Audit Trail
In some (extreme) cases we have seen that simply reindexing your data can improve speed by a factor of 10. Ultimately if your data continues to grow your system will be slower - if you outgrow Sage 50 then you may need to consider alternative software.
