Sage 500 ERP Support and Insights

Sage 500 version 2019 has just been released with several new enhancements and here is more detail on minor entity inactivation enhancement.

In a nutshell this enhancement gives you an ability to make Buyers and Reason Codes inactive by adding an active flag throughout the system.

This flag allows the controls in various Sage 500 tasks to filter out those values that are no longer useful for data entry.  Buyers or reference…

If you need to set or change the default value of a check box, you can write a VBScript within Customizer's script editor to select or clear a check box. The construct of the script is the same for all check box default customizations: Form.Controls("[control name of checkbox]").Value = ('0' or '1') [control name of checkbox]: click on the appropriate check box in the form, and note the control name in the Customizer…

Inventory Valuation report allows you to determine inventory value according to a specific date range based on transaction or posting dates. To generate the Past Period Inventory Valuation Report, the user will have to define the date of valuation and base the valuation on either the Transaction Date or Post Date.

Case 'Transaction Date'

We are looking at the QtyOnHand and Value in timInvtCalPerHist for the end…

Inventory Valuation report provides the value of inventory for some or all the inventory items in a warehouse for the prior periods. If you are troubleshooting Inventory Valuation report and need to dig into the tables and data that this report is using here is some helpful information on where the report data is coming from.

If you leave the report in the preview screen all the displayed data is still stored in the work…

If you have  wanted to setup any report in Sage 500 to be printed at a later time, you can use the Deferred Printing option that is available from report tasks. Here is how this works.

Lets say for example you want to setup a couple different reports to run later in the afternoon. The first report is the Aged Payable reports. In this example, we will setup the selection criteria to show us a list vendors that start with the…

In Sage 500 you can add the Data Import Manager job as a task on the user's menu by giving them the ability to run the tasks without granting them access to the Data Import
Manager module itself.

• Launch MAS 500 and go to System Manger>Tools>Task Editor.
• Select 'Add New Task' at the bottom of the Task List window.
• In the Task Editor Window select .NET Standard for the Launch Type and Data Import Manager…

It may be convenient to setup Sage 500 to auto start every time your computer boots, especially if you are using Sage 500 with Windows Authentication.

1. From your Windows OS, click on Start, All Programs and locate the Sage 500 application. Right click on it and select Copy
2. From your Windows OS, click on Start, All Programs and locate the Startup folder from the list.  On the Startup folder, right click and select Ope…

After the Generate Planned Orders has been run, the system will show all the suggested orders to create. The suggested orders is based on the MRP factors that have been selected on the Planned Orders tab. At this time, the work orders and purchase orders will not show up in Work Order Maintenance or Enter Purchase Orders.

If you agree with the suggested orders, you can update all of the suggested orders as Firmed as follows…

If you are interested in finding the name of the SQL view associated to a given lookup view screen, here are a couple of ways

From System Manager, Maintenance, Maintain Lookups and click on the lookup flashlight.
In the Lookup column, locate Vendor and double click to select it
You can see in the Current SQL Command box that the name of the view is vluVendor

The second method to find the name of the SQL view associated…

If you want to be able to set restrictions for users/groups on columns or rows in Business Insights Explorer(BIE) views,  you can with Maintain Task Restrictions.   To access, go to System Manager, Maintenance, Maintain Task Restrictions.  You will need to setup the restrictions for each BIE view AND the user or group being restricted. Lets look at a couple of examples of setting up restrictions and look at the BIE view after…

What is the difference between the Inventory Cost report and the Inventory Valuation report? Why is there an option for both Cost and Valuation in the Cost report?

The differences between the Inventory Cost and Inventory Valuation reports are primarily functionality.

• The Cost report is a snap shot of the cost or valuation at the point in time at which the report is run. If Valuation option is selected the report will…

For those that still print registers or reports to paper, there is a task that can help you manage what gets printed on those reports. There are several sections on the body of report that can be modified. Lets take a look at this task in more detail.

From System Manager, Maintenance, launch the Maintain Report Format task. When the task is displayed, there is a companyid dropdown, a tab section, and a preview section…

The cost tier is an important costing feature provided by IM which allows the system to track the actual cost at which an item was purchased every time. 

Sage 500 stores the cost in table timCostTier. Here is the schema for that table:

A cost tier stores the cost at which an item was added into the inventory and its quantity. The cost of an item is divided into four factors:

Direct Cost, Freight Cost, Sales Tax Cost…

When you want to make lookups load faster, there is an option available that may help.  I see many environments setup that when lookup screens are loaded, all of the data is populated. While the data is populating, you can only wait until its complete or click the Stop button. After the data has populated the lookup grid, then I see data being entered as a search criteria or filter. Instead of doing that, why not suppress…

In IM Options a user can specify whether negative on-hand balances will or will not be allowed in their system. If the decision is to allow negative balances, Sage 500’s Negative On-Hand report allows users to research and to correct any remaining negative on-hand balances at the end of each business day.

Remember that items using Lot, Serial or Both track method will not allow negative quantity on hand even…

The Settle Credit Card Transactions application is used to create Cash Management Bank Deposit batches containing credit card transactions from Sage 500 that have been settled at the processor using Paya Virtual Terminal. 

Given a date range, the application selects all un-deposited transactions from Sage 500, retrieves all settled transactions from the processor, and displays them in a grid.  The left hand side of the…

If you have not read my blog entitled "How to prevent access to the sage database" you may want to do that first before proceeding.  In that blog we setup a user in Sage 500 who could only access the data from the Sage 500 application. In this blog we will look at creating a user who only has access to data from Sage 500 AND read access from applications outside Sage 500.

There may be occasions where you need…

Lets say you have Sage 500 user who also has SQL Server Management Studio(SSMS), and knows how to access the data through SSMS. Is there a way to prevent this user to see data from SSMS but still have access through the Sage 500 application?  The answer is yes!

Sage 500 can make use of a T-SQL application role to restrict access to the application database.  Users are added to the Application Role group and the role uses…

Sage 500 ERP January 2019 Product Updates for v2017 and v2018 are released. These updates include several fixes that are detailed in the product update release notes. These updates also include 1099 updates for the tax year 2018.

The download links for client, server, client source, server source are available in the Sage Knowledgebase.

Click the following link to access your update and documentation:

Download Sage 500…

Earlier this month I wrote about a reporting feature available with SQL Server entitled "SQL Server Diagnostic Reports".  In part 2, we will drill a little deeper and look at a way to find schema changes using one of those reports.

This time I will show how you can run a report that shows you if someone made changes to objects in a database. You will need access to SQL Server Management studio and use a login…

Inventory items can be tracked by lot or individual serial number or can be both lot and serial tracked.  

• Serial - a unique number assigned to a single piece
• Lot - a unique ID assigned to a homogeneous quantity of material
• Both - use both serial and lot numbers 
• Negative quantity is not allowed for serial, lot or both tracked items
• Back Flush in manufacturing module cannot be used for the raw materials that use serial…

Sage 500 ERP 1099 Updates for tax year 2018 and versions 2018, 2017, and 2016 are released.

The download links for release notes, client, server, and source are available in the Sage Knowledgebase.

1. Click the following link to access your update and documentation:

Download Sage 500 ERP v.2018 1099 Updates for tax year 2018

Download Sage 500 ERP v.2017 1099 Updates for tax year 2018

Download Sage 500 ERP v.2016 1099 Updates…

1099 season is coming up and remember that in Sage 500 you can use AP/1099 Beginning Balances task to import beginning balances. A successful import inserts records into tapVend1099Bal table. 

The supported file layout is fixed length. Delimited files are not supported. If a record contains a vendor, year, form, and box that already exist in the table, the BegBal field is updated with the value from the file. A warning…

SQL Server has some helpful built in reports to give you statistics about objects, indexes, and users and more. The best part about this feature in SQL Server is that its included without having to buy anything else. I will give you an overview and show you how to access/run the reports. In part 2 i will drill a little more into a specific report that can be used to find Schema Changes
There are some 3rd party diagnostics…

Where can you change settings for your userid in Sage 500?  Under System Manager, Tools there is a task named User Preferences

On the first tab named Preferences, you can change things such as the ability to use the Enter Key as the Tab key. You can also turn on/off the Customizer icon and DataPorter icons as well.  If you are using SQL authenticated logins to access Sage 500 and you wanted to change your password to Sage…