I've been having an on-going "discussion" with Sage about the auto-generate PO feature in BV small business edition. I've taken the matter up with both Rick Davis (vice president, product strategy) and Siobhan Finders (Sage Business Vision Product Manager) . Siobhan contacted the programming group. I can't begin to express how dismal the response has been.
The "feature" as designed generates a purchase order that replenishes your inventory back up to the re-order point. A completely circular and useless exercise. The re-order point is the point where you need more. It is the "trigger" for issuing a purchase order. So why on earth would you want to simply replenish your stock to that point? While I certainly have got agreement from Siobhan that this is a useless exercise and not even remotely helpful, what I've been told is that this is the way the program was written, and so long as it works as written, they don't see a problem. It's also not on the radar to be fixed for at least two years, because nobody else has complained about it.
My argument is that the program isn't working as advertised. Anyone with even a modicum of business knowledge (and I've been doing this my entire working life) knows that you base your purchasing on a minimum and a maximum; your minimum is your re-order trigger, and your maximum is the quantity that you replenish up to. Minimum order quantity is used to round up or down so you don't order partial packages. This is business 101, yet their seems to be no desire to fix the problem. Clearly the people at SAGE don't understand how small business runs, nor do they understand customer service. You simply can't sell a product that doesn't work as advertised and then refuse to fix it.
The "support team" did come up with a band aid work around that involved increasing the minimum order quantity to some artificially generated number (ie make my minimum order quantity more than my actual minimum order quantity), but when I ran simulations the results were incorrect. The equation for determining the correct order quantity is very simple, and I have written a spreadsheet to deal with it, but that means exporting my inventory to the spread sheet, manipulating the numbers, and then manually entering the PO. That sort of takes the "auto" out of auto-generate, don't you think.
Perhaps if they had spent a small fraction of their time fixing the problems with the program, rather than re-vamping the customer portal I wouldn't have this complaint. Who are they trying to appeal to anyway? Business owners or teenagers? I really don't need blogs and tweets. I need to run my business effectively, efficiently and deliver products that work properly to my customers. That's how business is supposed to work.
Of course that's just the most egregious of the shortcomings with this system. I'm really starting to consider going back to QuickBooks. It wasn't perfect either, but at least their was some indication it was designed by business people rather than computer programmers.
I'd love to hear from other BV users who have tried to use this feature.
Dean