Are you maintaining data outside of your system for reporting? Stop wasting your time!

I come across a lot of people whom for some reason or another are taking information out of Sage 100 (formerly MAS 90 and MAS 200) and manipulating it, either in excel or access, to come up with reports or tables that they need to do their job. Sometimes these processes can take hours to complete.

How much time are you spending outside of Sage 100 to get information that you need?

One thing I tell all my clients is,
 “If the data is in the system, I can write a report to get the data out in a format you need to see it in. If the data is not in the system, let’s work on getting it in there in a way that will work for you.”

What this means is that a report that takes you, lets use a small number, ½ an hour a day to maintain and run outside of the system, can be set up to run at the press of a button. You might be thinking that ½ hour a day is not worth the money to set up a report or add fields, but your time is valuable. That short ½ hour a day is equal to 2.5 hours a week, 10 hours a month, 130 hours a year. That ½ hour spent to maintain that report outside of the system is taking up over 16 full work days a year of your time!

How much is your time worth?

Sage 100 has built in, often underutilized tools, that help the user get data into their system for reporting. Custom Office allows users to tailor their systems to meet their specific needs.

•  Add user defined fields to desired tables
• Add created fields to various data entry screens 
• Create User Defined Tables to store data for lookup and reporting purposes 
• Create scripts to further customize how the data interacts with your system

A typical example is a client that wants to track a certain piece of information for a customer or an item. A user defined field can be added to the respective maintenance screen (Customer or Inventory). Lets use inventory in this example; a client wants to track a non-standard item type and have a lookup table that contains all selectable types. This can be done with user defined fields and tables. Custom office then allows for the flow of the custom data to be determined. What this means is that you can create additional user defined fields that allow the data entered to flow through the system all the way through to history. The “Type” user defined field that you entered at the item level can then be used at the data entry level (sales order, invoice, purchase order, receipt, etc.) and then on to history. This gives the user complete control over reporting data at all point in their process. Now with the data in history, a user can add the created field to a report and utilize it just as if it was a standard field in the system.

Give M&M Solutions, Inc a call today so that we can help free up some of your valuable time. 707.425.9923