Actinink to Actinic?

[tdw]

Hi,
I just bought a copy of Actinic Business with actilink. I have Sage line 50 v10. What it the easiest or better way to get things going - add all the products to Sage and then use Actilink to convert into Actinic or the other way around? I am new to both products and I am learing about both.

How would you do it with a fresh new store?

Advice apprecaited.

Thanks

[chris ashdown]

I will leave the answer to your question to wiser people, but one point worth thinking about is to name your reference after the product i.e.

Product code from Manufacturer XYZ1234 then use this as the actinic and sage reference number as you will need to tie them both together in link

There is a option in Actinic to automatically insert ref numbers which would otherwise start at 1 and increase by 1 each product, this you do not need

[ajfish]

Well good luck getting to know Sage. It's a nightmare. Sits on Windows but that's about it. You can't cut and paste, even the scrolling works differently. It's such an awkward piece of software to use.
We have Actinic 7 and Sage Financial Controller 11. We created all our products in Actinic as we had an existing cart and believe we created a csv file to import the product names into Sage.
The link seems to be working but we were waiting ages for the WorldPay transaction Id to be added to the order detail as part of the Actinic Link to Sage process. What Actinic came up with after several months was to append it to the order number and not have the Trans ID as a separate field in Sage.. why this took so long I don't know.
Anyway, I am digressing.
Sage is the pits to use, so the Link software saves a lot of time. Each customer gets his own Sage account created when an order comes in, if it is the first time they have ordered. Then it is a case of Allocating the products, dispatching and printing the invoice. I just hope that the extra years lost from my life using Sage is made up for by the saving in time that the link software creates.

Andrew

[grimsacre]

Products set up

tdw,

I don't know how far you have got in setting up your product codes by now but the first question to consider is what you want information you want your product codes to give you. This will depend upon the type of products you sell and the number of components/attributes each product has (style, colour, size etc).

The actual setting up of the codes can be quite complicated depending upon your requirements. For example, we have a code formatted such that characters in particular positions within the code represent certain product attributes.

By using a standard format for your product codes you can extract information from the Sage Products module using reports sent to database or spreadsheet files.

I would advise you not to use the automatic code generation option in Actinic because, while quick and easy when you are starting, it has the following drawbacks:

The codes generated (which will just be 1,2,3,....100,101, ... etc) are in chronological order and may bear no relationship to the products you sell (this becomes worse when you expand your product range);

It is hard to match the codes to those you set up in Sage;

It makes analysis of the product information more awkward than it needs to be.


The structure of the product record in Sage is better suited to accounting and stock control. The product structure within Actinic is more suited to how the items will be seen in your shop.

Speaking as somebody who has been using Sage and Actinic separately and then had to meld the two together, if I were starting from scratch, I would create the product codes in Sage and then transfer to Actinic but I have to stress that it does depend upon your individual circumstances.

Cheers,
Richard

[saucysal]

One way transfer of products etc

From what I can make out from my own brief experience, you cannot transfer products from Actinic to Sage via Actinic Link. You can only transfer products from Sage to Actinic using Actinic Link; do this by checking the publish to web check box on the Web tab in individual products.

From my limited experience, once I have initially transferred all existing products into Actinic from Sage, when stocking new products I enter these separately into Sage and Actinic, not using Link: I now only use Link from Sage to Actinic to update stock quantities. If I update everything else, it messes up my carefully created products with components in Actinic.

When downloading orders into Sage using Link, it often creates a new customer when one already exists; this can be because the customer has typed their postcode without spaces, or their name with initials instead of first name, or any other difference in typing. I find this quite annoying. I have to manually check each time, change the account of the automatically entered order, check the totals are the same and adjust if necessary, and then delete the second create customer account. If the customer is a trade customer who has an account number, this problem may not occur.

I have reduced the amount of re-typing of addresses brought into Sage by putting some javascript code in the Checkout template and Order01 templates to change capitalize or uppercase as required - see other threads.

Sarah