Few Questions

Hi,

I just found out about Adagio after a HORRIBLE Sage Accpac ERP 500 upgrade from Accpac Plus 6.5.

The only data that converted was, Vendor Info, Customer Info, Inventory, and GL opening and closing balances. THATS IT??? No Purchase Order History, No Open Purchase Orders, No Customer History, No AP/AR History? Honestly what is Sage Accpac doing?

Well anywho... it was horrible.

I have already installed the demo and I think its wonderful but I got a few questions.

1) Since Adagio uses Accpac's Filesystem/Database System. How stable is it? I keep hearing DOS Accpac is unstable blah blah blah but so far Accpac Dos has been pretty good to our company.

2) Are there any plans on converting the data to a open source database server? (mysql?)

3) We have a module currently called Quote Master, it seems Adagio does not have anything similar to this.

4) Are the procedures for closing the day/closing the month similar to Accpac Dos. Closing the day everyday, and closing the month at the end of the month. I know with the new Sage Accpac ERP this was not true, but I am thinking Adagio follows just like the Accpac Plus.

5) Report Master? Does Adagio have a similar tool to report master?

6) Purchase Orders? I checked out some of the third party Purchase Order apps... The current method of doing POs is through IC. Our current Purchasing Department can literally RIFFLE through this with keyboard and hitting the enter key. Is there a similar method or another way of doing POs?

7) Lifeline? I am a bit worried with all the noise and people saying Accpac DOS is dying, how does Adagio's roadmap look like?\

Thanks,

Hi vegeetz,

Glad to read that your first impressions of Adagio are good - thanks for taking a look! I'll try to answer some of your questions as best as I can and perhaps some others may be able to also provide insight, especially those who don't work at Softrak and have a 'vested interest'.

1) We think Adagio is very stable - you don't require souped-up hardware to make it work. Whether or not DOS Accpac is stable or not in a particular environment doesn't really have much leading to whether Adagio will run smoothly.

2) At the current time, there are no immediate plans to change the database structure.

3) In the next release of Adagio Contacts, a quote system will be added that will retrieve Quote Master data and integrage with Adagio Order Entry. This is currently in development.

4) The entry model of Accpac Plus is very similar to Adagio, in regards to Day End / Month End / Year End. One main difference is with Adagio Ledger and year end, where Adagio allows you to open the next fiscal year before closing the current year - this was not possible with Accpac DOS GL.

5) Adagio has many different reporting tools"
- Crystal Reports for Adagio: A sophisticated reporting tool for simple and complex reports, with presentation quality, graphics and graphs/charts.
- Adagio GridView: A fast inquiry tool to find desired information, including printing and exporting to Excel.
- Adagio Sales Analysis: Integrates with Adagio Order Entry and Adagio Invoices to maintain historical sales data, allowing better collection of history for reporting.

6) There are 2 different purchase order solutions from 3rd party developers, depending on your requirements. Purchase Orders for Adagio is a very sophisticated and flexible solution similar to the product Inventory Receipts in the Accpac DOS world. PO Tracker is a simpler solution similar to the PO function that was part of Accpac DOS IC where requirements aren't as stringent.

7) I'd like to think that Adagio is around for the long haul. It has been shipping for over 8 years, with predecesors for over 13 years. Softrak has been in business for over 20 years. Other people may want to post their comments here as well.

Hi,

Do you know when Adagio Contacts will be out? Quotes are the lifeline of our business. If there is no quotes we can't move forward.

Also how many employees is Adagio suggested for? I was reading some websites saying its only useful if your company has 1-9 employees. Seems a bit small...

Thanks,

Hello vegeetz,

Just to add a bit more depth where I can.

1) Adagio is very stable in a stable hardware environment. There are things we do within the application to minimize problems that are not done in the DOS world.

2) We have not planeed a migration to a different database manager, because we have not been able to enumerate any tangible benefits to our clients of such a move. With Crystal Reports for Adagio and other report writing tools, access to the accounting data is usually more important to our customers than how it's stored on the disk.

3) We're hoping this upgrade will ship in the next few months, and indeed the beta is running in few production environments. In the interim, your Quote Master module will run fine with Adagio.

4) Adagio Ledger supports unlimited multiple years of history and a "soft" year end. Other period end processing is similar to the ACCPAC Plus model with wch you are familiar.

5) Adagio also supports a simple, drag-and-drop specification (forms) designer, so our clients do not have to learn Crystal Reports to change an invoice or credit note layout. The specification designer directly supports multi-part forms and is included in each module supporting customizeable documents.

Adagio management reports can be modified using Crystal Reports for Adagio and cusomtized reports can be added to the Reports menu in an application (with a security model).

The Adagio Financial Reporter (included in Adagio Ledger) is a full spreadsheet with many powerful features, including drill-down to the detailed transactions underlying a number on the statement.

6) Your Adagio Partner should be able to help you choose between the two PO solutions.

7) Softrak has been doing accounting software since 1985. Adagio has been shipping since 1999. It's all we do, and we enjoy doig it.

Thanks for considering Adagio. Please feel free to contact me by phone if I can answer further questions.

Hello again,

1-9 employees! Please point me to that site. Perhaps 1-9 people in the accounting department.

We have sites running 25 OrderEntry stations concurrently, and over 40 simultaneous users.

Our model client is

• $1-100 Million in sales (or annual turnover). This figure is really more about transaction volume than actual size. We have had a local insurance company posting a g/l batch for over $1 Billion.
• A full time accounting department (or person - not including people doing sales order entry). Someone who understands the difference between a debit and a credit.
• No IT department (although our larger clients usually have an "IT Guy" just to keep all their PC's running).
• Report Driven. Our clients print monthly financial statements and want to push the accounting data out to people's desks without necessarily giving them access to the accounting progrms themselves (you can do this with GridView).

Does this help?

Thanks for the responses.... The whole Sage Accpac ERP was a complete nightmare. So I am just doing my research on Adagio. It seems to meet our needs but just lacking the quote part.

I guess I will have to wait to see what happens there.

Thanks

One last question, is there a way i can read the tables/info from linux? I want to run some scripts to run reports nightly and so forth.

Thanks,

Hi Vegeetz,

Adagio OLEDB allows you to read data from the Adagio tables under program control. Since Adagio is a full Windows application, you could also use a Windows "macro" program to drive the application. Unfortunately, there is no macro facility built into Adagio as there was in ACCPAC Plus.

I did confirm this afternoon that we expect Adagio SalesCQ (which has manages quotations) shipping sometime this quarter (although more towards the end than the beginning).

Thanks for considering Adagio.

Ack... if I have ODBC drivers for Accpac will these still work if my data has been used with Adagio?

Also in INV table, what does picking sequence mean?

Thanks,

Hello,

They will work for the files that are unchanged in Adagio (things like the customer and invetory item master). They will not have access to the extra information we carry in Adagio (things like e-mail address and optional fields).

They won't work for the Adagio Ledger, unless you buy the legacy (8.1) version.

Are you just reading the ACCPAC data, or are you using ODBC Professional to write back into the tables?

Sorry, but I'm not familiar enough with the ODBC naming to know which table you're refering to. The "picking sequence" field in inventory control is an informational field that is used to sort some of the reports (orders have their iems printed in "picking sequence" order to help in the warehouse).

Hope you like the responsiveness of the technical support forum!

Hi vegeetz

I don't work for Softrak so I am allowed to say "unauthorized" things. I am one of their independent consultants.

I am one who has installed the beta version of Adagio SalesCQ (Quote Master for Adagio) in a production environment. It perfectly converted the Quote Master database. My client is very happy - they can email beautiful looking quotes with a few clicks! If you are thinking of switching to Adagio, don't hold back until SalesCQ is officially released; "buy" the module now and install your reseller's beta version.

I have been selling Adagio since it first came out in 1999, and support about 200 installs. It is the ideal fit for ACCPAC Plus users. Too bad you had a horrible experience with Sage - didn't we all! But the Adagio experience is completely different and wonderful.

Steve

Well if I used Adagio in the future I would like ODBC to be able to read tables. You guys got it going well on the front end of things. Way better than the dos version of Accpac.

Hell yeah its pretty damn good support!

One of the big questions is making sure our Audit Lists print just like the Audit lists in our Accpac Dos version prints out.

The new Sage Accpac ERP didnt have the accounting features we currently have. I am wondering if Adagio has different accounting features than the Accpac Dos Version?

For example, costing. Our current system you can base cost off a certain price, in the new Sage Accpac ERP you can only do it by percent?

Thanks,

By "cost off a certain price" - do you mean "price" (as in sell price) off a certain cost (like average or standard cost). Adagio supports that.

Our accounting feature set is a superset of what you have in ACCPAC Plus V6.5A. Our audit lists are similar (but generally take fewer pages to print).

damn you steve!! haha... well we just spent 100k on Sage Accpac ERP and it turns out it doesnt even work for our business/accounting model. so i have to be very careful in selecting the next go to product.

i need to demo a working system to the other managers before i get any "lets do this". so if the salescq is not available to try i got no where to go on this.

thanks,

One of our large distribution clients is currently "beta testing" the Quotes module. They have 6 users doing order/quote entry and the system works great for them. Even though the module is still in development, they liked it so much that they recently went live with it.

While I can't speak for Softrak, based on the completeness of the beta version I would bet the final release will be ready very soon. Speak to your Softrak consultant (if you don't have one yet, see here for a listing: US Resellers ) and you can surely get a demo of the current beta version which would be perfect for evaluation purposes.

Running end of day? Currently in DOS Accpac everyone needs to be out of Accpac to run end of day procedures. Is this the same for Adagio? Also if a user left the office and left Adagio running is there a way the administrator and log him off remotely?

Thanks,

Hello vegeetz,

End of day is the same in Adagio, although the day end processing is much faster since only active orders are scanned (Adagio OrderEntry maintains a complete history in a separate set of files, so the active invoice file is normally much smaller). If you decide to test this on a copy of your data, do the timing on the 2nd dayend process. The firsttime the function is run, Adagio will want to create the historical data files, and this can take a long time (depending on the amount of history you have).

There is currentlyno way to force a user who has forgotten to log out, to elegantly exit the application. "Pulling the plug" on a workstation that is just sitting with the application open will usually be OK though.

Define usually okay? Also in Accpac Plus we have this utility called FixIT plus... although I hear that Accpac Plus in itself does not keep the data clean as it should. Does Adagio have a similar utility or is one even needed?

Thanks,

Hello vegeetz,

The Data Integrity Check functions (File | Data Integrity Check) has a Rebuild button that is enabled if correctable errors are found. A complete log of the errors is maintained. All databases need some ways to repair data, which may be damaged through hardware failure. Running FixIt+ on an Adagio database is a bad idea.

Haha, well I wouldnt run fix it on adagio. I was asking if adagio had a similar product.

Also when emailing invocies, how do you create a subject line? Also is there a way to add an email address to send to on the fly. With out going back and changing the customer profile?

Thanks,

Hello again...

E-mailed invoices are sent as PDF attachements. The "body" of the e-mail is generated using a mergeable template (Edit | Email Cover Sheets). Emails are placed in a queue prior to transmission and may be reviewed from there prior to being sent. The e-mail address can be edited in the e-mail queue.

If you are e-mailing statements, you can have Adagio Receivables automatically add a note to the customer file recording the data and e-mail address the statement was sent to.

Adagio applications have 'Email Cover Sheets' that are part of the emailed documents. This supplies not only the Subject line of the email but also the text of the email. You may insert database fields (customer name, invoice amount, due date, etc) into the Email Cover Sheet - the text but not the subject. The actual invoice is a PDF attachment to the email.

An email address can be entered directly on the invoice, different than what is on the customer record. In the case of OrderEntry, there are 2 different email addresses yo can add (one for the bill-to and another for the ship-to). When emailing, you choose which email address to use (either the bill-to, the ship-to or the one on the customer record).

If you chose to download an evaluation of the Adagio programs and look at the supplied sample data, there are examples of the email cover sheets that can be set up.

Hmm I did not know that about the queue that you can edit emails. Thats actually what I wanted to hear. Seems that you guys thought of almost everything haha.

Is it possible to have two different Accounts Payable modules. Currently we have two , one for our vendors and one for our 1099s. for our vendors it uses *.dat, and for our 1099s it uses *.sec.

If not have two, is there a simple way of combining them together?

Also I been having a hard time finding a reseller/consultant in the Los Angeles, CA Area? Any help?

Thanks,

Sorry if I am asking a lot of questions, I just want to make sure this is the right software to get. Thanks for all your time hehe.

In Adagio, you can indicate whether to keep 1099 amounts for a vendor (same as in ACCPAC Plus). Why do you have separate data files?

If you need to keep track of different types of 1099 amounts for a single vendor, then we recommend you set up two different vendor accounts in Payables.

Here is a list of our US Resellers. We have several in the LA area (although I know that covers a lot of territory).

With regards to 1099s, Adagio is the same as ACCPAC Plus was.

Although Adagio can print 1099s, I recommend generating a report listing all payments to 1099 Vendors (the report is called the Vendor Transactions report, checks only), and then using a cheap program to print or efile 1099s. The one I use, YES2007, can import text files which Adagio can create, but YES2007 is in the $300 range. There are many other cheaper ones. YES2007 can also do W2s.

Steve