Recommend Software

jayo2004

I am looking for a basic software package for a company that sells cement. At the moment the way they are doing it is someone comes in buys a bag of cement and the guys are just writing it out on paper and giving it to girl in office who uses sage to create invoices. I could network sage I suppose but they what something as basic as possible as they guys have'nt a clue about sage. Is there a very simple program I could use that generates lets say an excel file and then let the girl import it into sage?? Any ideas on software or on which way to set this up would be great.

aidan_walsh

I could network sage I suppose but they what something as basic as possible as they guys have'nt a clue about sage.

Stop supposing what they want and ask them. Unless you actually talk to the people using the system about what they're looking for, you'll never find a system that suits them.

alancool

Have you considered coding your own solution? That way you can meet their particular requirements very simply.

jayo2004

I would'nt even know where to start TBH.. I am heading out there today to have a chat with them so I will have a better idea what they want.

jayo2004

ye it looks like they need someone to code there own software as all they want to do is to be able to print a docket to a dot matrix printer



The program just needs to be able to store customer information and enter info (mainly numbers). Any ideas where i would get someone to write something like this.

cousin_borat

I would investigate adding a portal to Sage. The portal would just be a simple web page front end that take the input data from the person selling the cement.

Once it is submitted it should then go into the Sage system and be ready for the invoice to be created.

This is a very simplified explanation but this is the model I would follow.

I don't know whether Sage or your version of Sage has a portal module you can purchase or add on or whether Sage could be opened up to take information from a custom build portal. With a little but of digging I'm sure it would be easy to find out.

Best of luck

Oracle

All good suggestions so far, although I was thinking about another part of the problem- entering the data in the first place. According to your first post: "....someone comes in buys a bag of cement and the guys are just writing it out on paper and giving it to girl in office...." That could be eliminated altogether with the use of a simple point of sale system with a bar code scanner. They're not as expensive as you might think, you can even plug the scanner straight into a PC with a USB connection. That to my mind would be the ideal solution, maybe combined with the front end software cousin_borat suggested.

cousin_borat

hmmm, I've worked with Oracle on handheld scanners communicating back to a full blowm Oracle ERP system via Telnet for Warehouse Management Sytems.

Not sure how you could get an inexpensive scanner to work. There's certainly plenty of Open Source POS systems. Another avenue to investigate would be to plug the scanner into excel of access (pretty sure theres a bar code scanner plug in for access at the least) and make the web service call from there to the other system, just a thought.

cousin_borat

hmmm, I've worked with Oracle on handheld scanners communicating back to a full blown Oracle ERP system via Telnet for Warehouse Management Sytems. Not sure how you could get an inexpensive scanner to work. There's certainly plenty of Open Source POS systems. Another avenue to investigate would be to plug the scanner into MS Access (pretty sure theres a bar code scanner plug in for access) and make the web service call from there to the other system, just a thought. Take a look on sourceforge.net for Open source POS software and you might also find bar code scanners as well

Capt'n Midnight

In the olden days you got a scanner that was in line and got it's power from the keyboard
<beep> and it was exactly the same as typing a bar code


To make barcodes the easiest way is to find a free code 39 font and add an asterix at each end of the alphanumeric - no checksum - many fonts on the web
Type 93 needs a calculation for checksums
http://morovia.com/education/symbology/code93.asp

first link on google - not a recomendation - just to show the USB version works as a windows keyboard, the "keywedge" is the old in line with keyboard ( so works without drivers on any OS) and there is an option for RS232 if you feel masochistic

http://www.barcodeman.com/altek/simple/simple.php

Oracle

cousin_borat wrote:

Not sure how you could get an inexpensive scanner to work. There's certainly plenty of Open Source POS systems. Another avenue to investigate would be to plug the scanner into excel of access (pretty sure theres a bar code scanner plug in for access at the least) and make the web service call from there to the other system, just a thought.

Sorry, yes when I said Point of Sale I meant a simple DIY type, for example; a cheap PC + USB scanner + front end software of the type you suggested. It would be ideal to have the web service call the system from the DIY POS system over a network.