Importing Sales Orders - Unit Price and Amount are coming in as negative values rather than positive values, and what is the Number of Distributions value used for on a Sales Order?

I am new to Sage 50 and trying to help this small business to import sales order information.  I started by identifying the fields that I thought we needed and then I exported that so that I had everything in the right sequence.  I don't see a place when entering a sales order manually, to enter a value for Number of Distributions, yet when importing, an error message told me that I needed this field.  I just added it and included a default value of 1.  Do you see any issue with this?  Then secondly, my values in the csv file for Amount and Unit Price were positive, but when imported they were switched to negative.  Any idea what causes that?  Certainly I could change my values in the spreadsheet to be negative, but I would rather understand why this is happening and fix the root cause.

Thank you for any insight.

  • 0

    Hi Meredith,

    Working with CSV files and Sage 50 is a mess.  Where is your order content originating from that you are seeking to import?

    Scott

  • 0 in reply to cartspan

    We are a very small operation.  Our sales people write up their orders on an excel file.  I was planning to use formulas to pull their data into the right format on a separate sheet in Excel, and then gather all the data manually (cutting and pasting) to create the CSV to import.  Trying to save the one person who is on Sage50 from having to manually rekey all the sales orders in order to invoice them.  Honestly, am not sure if the process will overall save time or not, but might allow us to shift the responsibility for pulling together the file to another person.

  • 0 in reply to Meredith Koerner

    Hi Meredith,

    Where are your sales people entering orders from?

    Scott

  • 0 in reply to cartspan

    We have 3 sales people, and they mostly take orders over the phone, and put the information into a home-made excel form that we then print (2 copies) and give to production and to purchasing.  We are a very small Ad Specialty/Embroidery/Screenprint operation.

  • 0 in reply to Meredith Koerner

    Hi Meredith,

    I'm sorry for not being more clear.  Where are your sales people 'physically' located when they are taking orders?  Are they on the road, at home, or in-house?

    Scott

  • 0 in reply to cartspan

    sorry I misunderstood.....they are in house, we have a small office

  • 0 in reply to Meredith Koerner

    Are you not able to provide them each with an instance of Sage for the purpose of entering orders?

  • 0 in reply to cartspan

    no, they are all on Macs, and we don't want to make the investment in purchasing PC's for them.  My understanding is that Sage50 is not good on Macs

  • You can use a program called Parallels on your Mac that would allow you to use Sage 50.

    www.google.com/search

    We also offer Hosting.  You can host your Sage 50 where everyone can reach the data from anywhere!

    Kind regards,
    Shirley
    Shirley Byard, President | Sage 50 -MASTER Certified Consultant & Certified Trainer
    Best Business $trategies 
    Phone: 304-810-0027 | Fax: 304-217-2612
    Top selling Sage 50 reseller since 2011
    SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS:Sage 50|act!  Forms:Checks,W-2's & More
    Software ADD-ONS:Timeclocks |Mfg |MS Office |Merchant Services |SalesTax|Payroll |Auto Entry|Backup|Shipping
    SERVICES: Data Repair| Onsite/Offsite Support| Real Time Training| Software Implementation & Data Conversions|Cloud Hosting| XLGL Reports| Purging|Year-End Date change|Bookkeeping
    Want more information about Sage 50? subscribe to our BLOG  
    Please visit our website BestBusinessStrategies.com & see our 100% Price Match Guarantee.
  • 0 in reply to Meredith Koerner

    Hi Meredith,

    I recommend ditching the spreadsheet approach to getting your orders into Sage 50; you are only going to accelerate the production of grey hair.  Instead, set your company up with a web-based order entry front-end that anyone can access from ANYWHERE.

    Assuming your reps can access the Internet, what I would do is:

    1. Spin-up an inexpensive open-source eCommerce platform for 'Internal Use Only' as an order-entry front-end.  This means only your sales reps can access it. 

    This involves:

    (a) Renting yourself some hosting space with a reliable web hosting company.  I like A2 Hosting out of Michigan because of their automated tools in setting up the domain and eCommerce platform.  This might be around $100/yr total. 

    (b) Registering yourself a dummy domain for your site.  It can be MeredithsOrders.com.  It doesn't really matter what the name is as only your internal employees will be hitting it.  This is a first time cost of $20/30 with an annual renewal of about the same.

    (c) Auto-install the wildly popular WordPress content-management system using the automated tools available.  Even if it's not A2, most other hosting platforms offer similar tools. This is FREE (believe it, or not)

    (d) Auto-install WooCommerce on-top of the WordPress system.  This is presently the most popular eCommerce platform on the planet with close to 40% market-share.  The standard install of WooCommerce is FREE (believe it, or not).  You will want to find yourself a commercial plug-in ($) that allows log-in by Sales Representative. 

    2.  Install my ecommerce integration (CartSpan) on the accounting computer that runs on a PC.  This AddOn for Sage 50 will go out to your new web-based order-taking platform (WooCommerce) every 15 minutes and automatically import new orders.  While CartSpan is NOT FREE, it really is one of the most cost-effective tools on the market for what it does.  CartSpan also manages your inventory between Sage 50 and WooCommerce, so your Sales Representatives would actually be able to see what your inventory levels are as they take orders for items.   Licensing for this integration can be found on the link provided.

    The benefits of this approach are:

    Total initial and ongoing costs are minimal compared to the labor hours you will save.  You will be surprised how much of this you can do yourself if you dig in.  

    Your data integrity will be much better within this system.  You won't be fighting with CSV files when sales reps mis-key data into columns.  It just won't happen.

    Hope this helps. 

    Scott