Support for Microsoft Office Accounting 2008

[johngwms]

Two weeks ago I finally dumped Sage Line 50 v13 for Microsoft Office Accounting 2008 Professional (MOA). I am really pleased I did. Having suffered with Sage for over 10 years it was a breath of fresh air to start using a user friendly accounts package. The whole experience was like riding on a rollercoaster packed with exciting basic time saving features that Sage should have added (and were asked to) over the years. I was able to transfer most customer account data correctly but not all sales and purchase transactions (v13 is not currently fully supported).

I have used Microsoft's email support many times to resolve porting issues but most of these were due to lack of knowledge on my part and now MOA 2008 is running my accounts smoothly. Support was direct from the USA and has been excellent. I even received callbacks by phone to check I was happy.

Anyway, has anybody out there been able to link Actinic v9 with MOA? I do hope Actinic get around to it soon. In the mean time I am happy to forego some flexibity to use such an excellent value product.

[chris ashdown]

Yes there are many accounts packages better than sage from a users point of view, but without that magic link they are as good as a chocolate fireguard, unless you want to run them independently

As there is no real money to be made from the links type program both sides appear reluctant to undertake the work untill they are forced by popular demand

Maybe there is room for a independant company to sell a link, good little earner but probably loads of programming and design time

[Jan]

Mole End are looking into this ATM. Email support and we will keep you informed of progress.

Regards,

[Darren B]

Jan do you see this as a real possibility?

I hate sage, but as mentioned, its all there is really. I have not looked at MS accounts but if it comes off then this is definately one i'll look at.

time for some reasearch me thinks

[Darren B]

Oooooh its free, obviously a limited version but £150 for the business version aint bad

[Jan]

We are looking at using it ourselves, and it looks as if you could use our One Stop Order Processing product to transfer the data over (perhaps with a couple of mods - not sure yet), so it's very likely that we will find a way to link Actinic to it.

Regards,

[Darren B]

I'll keep my fingers crossed then Jan

[Mike Hughes]

I've been using MOA for a couple of weeks now and so far I'm quite impressed. Better integration would be nice, but at the moment I run a separate spreadsheet for sales reporting and stock management so can cope until integration is in place (or I write my own).

Mike

[Darren B]

Hi Mike

What version are you using, im guessing the free version has a number of features removed / hidden

[JGLIGHTING]

Hi
I would be interested in this link as well. I have just downloaded the trial version and it looks really good but not had enough time to play around with it. I am using sage v11 at the moment and I don't like it.

Hope someone will bring a link out soon.

[4children2enjoy]

How to integrate with Microsoft Office Accounting 2008

It is fairly straight forward to provide a reasonable level of integration between Actinic v9 and Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008. A summary of how we achieve this is as follows:

1. Create a simple Access database (.mdb) to act as an interface between MOA and your Actinic site(s).

2. Transfer your existing products into MOA using Import Excel for products. Thereafter, we would recommend MOA becomes the “Master” location for all your product data.

3. Add any user-defined product fields into MOA that you require. For instance, we have added “Image filename” x 3 and “Age Range” to the MOA product record.

4. In your Access system, follow the instructions in MOA Help entitled “Access Tools: Create an Access report” to link the MOA product file into your Access system (in real time).

5. Write a query that takes all the MOA product fields and appends them into Actinic product file(s) set up in your Access system. We actually have five of these, for five different Actinic websites.

6. In each of your Actinic websites, externally link the products to the relevant Actinic product file in your Access system.

7. Write a simple Macro in your Access system, that will recreate your Actinic product file(s) from the latest MOA product data whenever it is run.

8. Schedule a regular task (eg hourly) that:

a. Runs the Macro above, to transfer the latest product and stock data out of MOA.

b. Uploads each Actinic website in turn (using the /u switch), so that the latest product and stock data is online.

This completes product integration. With orders received, you have the option to either:

a. transfer each Actinic order to become an MOA sales order, and then use MOA for sales order processing, or

b. transfer each Actinic order to become an MOA sales invoice, and then simply use MOA as a sales ledger.
Either way, the procedure is very similar, as follows:

1. In your Access system, create a linked table for each of the main Actinic order export .csv files (Persons.csv, Orders.csv and Orderlines.csv). We have five websites, so we have five sets of these.

2. Create three tables in your Access system to act as archives for the Persons, Orders and Orderlines records downloaded.

3. Write three queries that will add all new Actinic orders received to your Persons, Orders and Orderlines tables.

4. Schedule a regular task (eg hourly) that downloads all new Actinic orders into the Access system (using the /d and /x switches), and runs the queries above.

5. Write two queries that will translate all the new Persons records and Orderlines records received into MOA Customer records and MOA Sales Order (or Sales Invoice) format.

6. As often as you like, from within MOA, use import Excel to import the new Customers and Sales Orders (or Sale Invoices) into your MOA system.

The above achieves a basic level of integration. Our own Access system does a bit more than this – for instance it updates stock without the need to go through MOA, thereby ensuring that our online stock figures are never more than 1 hour out of date.

Let me know if any step above needs more clarification.

[Jarvis]

It is fairly straight forward...

Yeah, right.

[Darren B]

Yeah, right.

when the mention of writing your own macros came up everything seem to go fuzzy

[Steve G Griggs]

That's simple.....??? my brain hurts reading it all.

[chris ashdown]

Life with sage has suddenly seemed much easier