Linking Actinic business to accounts system

[alexwren]

Hi,

This is a bit of a teaser so I understand if no one wants to answer this post.

I have a client (a wine trader - trade and consumer) who has the Pegasus Opera II accounts system that they use for everything! To my knowledge there is no connector for Actinic Business so I need to find a manual way to do this.

Ideally we need to setup an automatic import from Opera to reflect client accounts, stock levels, price changes and product additions/alterations. I know that we can probably do an automated output from Opera as a CSV. I am then hoping that we can do an automated (scheduled command line?) import for actinic followed by a scheduled (also command line) upload. Ideally I do not want the client to use Actinic for anything other than overall maintenance for site text and settings.

Once this works then we need to do the same for orders. An automated download followed by export to a CSV. This can then be auto imported to Opera. This is probably the easiest path to do.

I am also aware that you can use Dynamic linking to external databases and spreadsheets. This sounds promising, where can I get info on this?

Re functionality - can anyone tell me if I will be able to achieve the following:

- Customer (trade) specific pricing
- A customised main product list for each trade customer (their winelist) and then access to the whole list
- Orders on account with a credit limit trigger
- Stock control controlled by Opera

I have a feeling that this solution could be made to work but would love some confirmation from some of you experienced Actinic developers.

Thanks in advance.

Alex

[Jan]

Hi Alex,

You need to use hierarchical import to import your customer data. Once done you would need to automated the Actinc import (we have automated most things but not that) to load the data.

You could use flat file or hierarchical import to import the product and section data. Again you would need to automate the import. You could use external database linking to import the product and maintain quite a bit of the product data.


Once the data is there, you could use our automation products to upload the website (or you could use the Actinic Business command line options), you could also use them to download orders and run the actnic export to create the csv files you need to bring the order data into Pegasus.

More details on our automation products are available at http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/Actinic_Moles.html, there is also a free trial.

>- Customer (trade) specific pricing
Each customer is assigned a price schedule, which can give a general discount for all products with the option of specific prices for individual products.

- A customised main product list for each trade customer (their winelist) and then access to the whole list
>- You can define customer specific products, if you put all of the wines in a list of the front page and then only enable specific wines for specific customers (or rather price schedules) then you will achieve what you are looking for.

- Orders on account with a credit limit trigger
There is a spending limit for customer accounts but I think that it is per order rather than per customer,

- Stock control controlled by Opera
You can use external linking to do this, so long as Opera uses an ODBC database.

Regards,