New Order Screen

[itflash]

Is there a way for the "New Order Screen" to be independant of Actinic so multiple users can use it?

Or is there an add-on to create orders?

The solution I am working on may have a few people taking telephone orders, but that is all that they will do so I dont what to have to purchase another actinic just to take orders.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

[leehack]

Multi user licenses sounds just the job for you, details on the actinic site. It was £300 per license last time i looked.

[itflash]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, but as I say, seems expensive just for a sales person to enter an order.

The orders are exported to Sage as well, so it would simply be to enter an order to calculate the discounts.

[leehack]

£300 to give a user the right tool for the rest of their life is hardly expensive. Annoying to pay i could accept, it's certainly not expensive though, they're probably sitting on an £800 PC to do it.

Only thing i could think is to use the website itself, have a look at what "actinet" from gabe can do also, that may have some mileage.

[itflash]

thanks for the suggestions.

actinet is only viewing order - cannot amend line items.

£300 x 10 = big bill.
if it was one user then ok, but there could be between 5 and 10.

[Rich Brady]

Peter, surely if you selling enough to warrant having 10 manned telephone lines, then the £300 will soon be recouped?

[click4]

Hi,

I use actinic and we have 12 lines in our business. Actinic wasn't really up to the job for us in terms of quickness and functionality. The offline order system quickly finds products which are synced with sage for you to choose.

Our actinic orders are transferred through to another access database (which is works very fast). Stock is allocated to customers within this access database (again very fast-we have 7000 products).

Now we can have as may users as we like making offline orders into our new access database, which also houses our online orders. The database easily highlights offline and online orders as well as a host of other stuff. It really is a great piece of kit.

The system I have has lots of bells and whistles that suits our business but can be modified to what you need. The only thing it doesn't have is a pay now button which would take you straight into sage but we've been making enquiries.

[leehack]

Lynne's sounds very good, 10 users on a multi user actinic system is a pipe dream IMO, it just wouldn't handle that. I think you'll need to consider other options.

[click4]

Offline Ordering

Exactly Lee,
We struggled with 4-5 users on multi user.
Our access system is so quick. Prices can be changed very easily per order, items quickly deleted ect. All the orders are then sent through to sage. I just wish actinic had a faster more robust offline ordering system.

We actually paid in total £7k-ish (£300 a year support) on our system to be built which includes a great stock sytem, auto emailing customers at certain periods. ie before delivery, thankyou email after delivery ect. multi user offline orders, super fast stock allocation (sage drags its heels with this), customer notes box, which then tables times ect when customer was spoken to and which member of staff made the notes, emails relevant suppliers purchase orders, ect - did i mention it is integrate into the bar scanners in the warehouse-the system bleeps like mad if the warehouse guys scan more stuff in thats needed :-).Best money ever spent.

The offline part is just a small part so Im sure it wouldn't cost that much to implement. Im no tech head like you guys, i just know what makes life easier.

[plantsforshade]

Hi

This would make a great system for a plug-in developer to offer I am sure it would have loads of applications.

Enterprise is meant be much more robust in the multi-user format but at a princely cost, but probably still only less than half the wages of one of your telephone operators

Regards

Nigel

[itflash]

thanks for all the replies, all very interesting

my problem was that the discounts are set up in Actinic (buy 1 get one free, etc) so I was hoping to use Actinic to do this and calculate it for me.

Looks like I'll have to write an order entry screen which takes the discounts out of Actinic and pushes an order into Sage.

Anyone want to buy an add-on ?

[cbarling]

We've got a project running internally to help anyone who is experiencing performance problems in Actinic. It should be possible to place orders perfectly fast in Actinic with 10 users, so anyone experiencing such a problem should be referred to the project to sort things out.

As far as I'm aware, there is no-one with that sort of problem who hasn't been helped. Please let drop me an email if you know differently.

Chris