Sage 100

Anyone know what is up with Hightower today? I've tried calling their phone number multiple times but no answer ... just rings and rings.

Jane, Ed W. posted a note earlier that the may be closed - like closed down. Everyone is trying to figure out what's going on with them.

Hi Jane-I called them earlier today and got the ringing phone too. Sent an email earlier this morning too, but no response.

Wow ....

Yep, everyone's reaction...but no one's confirmed yet.

http://erplife.com/2012/03/20/erp-var-hightower-inc-reportedly-closes-for-undetermined-period-of-time/

Wow indeed....

Yikes.

Wow...interesting.

The firm of the future.

My Goodness!

Re-direct: https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/9869632 (link likely won't work for all Members)

Their phone says T1 outage. We really need to know more before starting fatality rumors.

Let's just take a stab and say its a cash flow crunch. That is, they have big bills to pay and need to stop outgoing costs along with a probably lack of projects. This is an emergency hump fix. That being said, if Pascal thinks squeezing var's who are under the current model, and these guys probably make their 30% to 35% on maintenance, then WTF does he think is going to happen with their future model. If this blows up into some all out bankruptcy, this has to be a 'come to Jesus' moment for sage on deciding whether they can sacrifice productive chunks of their channel to maximize short term profits.

I just heard from a source that employees showed up to work with a sign on the door saying they were closed. I am checking some sources

Hey Joe, we were just talking about V-B last week Regarding your shop floor bar code enhancements, have you ever discussed with Ron Chompf and Scanforce the possibility about bundling your enhancements together and offer a one stop shop/point of contact so resellers wouldn't have to deal with three different vendors when bundling this solution together for clients? Just a thought, but one I think a lot of resellers would appreciate.

@Jeff--you raise a vaild point. The three vendors bring the best of all worlds, but it could be ""packaged"" better.

A single point of contact AND packaged so that it would seem to be ONE vendor involved would really smooth out the sale. From a reseller stand point, we wonder how well you play together. Bringing ""one"" vendor to the table would also aleviate the end user angst that there five are fingers (Sage, ROR, V-B, Scanforce and ACS) in the pie and possibly pointing at each other when the install hits a rough patch.

Maybe you could start a new thread on this subject so it will be easier to search on.

FYI, We took that above bunlding idea to a more sophisticated level, but its the same concept: http://www.distributionsoftware.co/

One EULA, reduced bundle pricing and got MS to reduce NAV pricing so sum of all the parts is still competitive to distribution vertical software.

It would be really helpul to start a new thread and leave this one just to Hightower comments ... thanks!

New thread started.

Anyone have a direct number of an employee - how can we handle a mod that needs registering?

I think you are probably SOL.

SOL at least for now as @MarkChinsky indicated, this could be a temporary situation.

Should this not be one of these situations where Sage steps in and have access to hightowers source code and assists clients until they are able to wind down the hightower addons? I thought being part of the master developer program it helps in situations such as this. Am I wrong?

It looks as if we may have a chance to find out. Realistically not many programmers want to pick up another programmers code.

I am also not sold this is all a result of Sage policy changes. Most of Sage's changes have yet to be enacted.

Just called and now you get the classic ""this line has been disconnected"" message. If anybody else has any info, please post. We certainly would like to find out what is happening since we also have open cases and open quotes to close some product sales with them.

Any buzz on Linkedin yet? Sage?

I had to speak with one of the two clients today. I couldn't let it go any longer - she was pressing me for additional training (as well she should have been). I told her only the facts that I KNEW - Brian calling me, no one answering my emails after a certain point, no one answering the phone. I am obviously willing to continue to work with them, but not for free, so she is checking into what was prepaid at Hightower. What a mess. What gets me - if they have any intention of coming back to life - what makes them think the clients will stand for this?

Sorry folks that prepaid money has long been spent those clients will never see it.

One theory I heard is those prepaids may have been an issue

Wooo hoooo I am at a HighTower POS client and just fixed a printing issue. They had a support ticket out and were waiting for a response! Client's response when I told them of the news about HighTower..... So - what do you think Sage will do for us?

I think the Sage response will be... ""Buy AccuPOS

Or..We'll take your ROR and keep all the margin now, thanks!

Once these new policies take affect, no way will you see client feeding frenzies like you did with MIS since it would likely damage your 90% number for no maintenance margin.

@MarkChinsky - My first thought when I saw this yesterday was ""Pascal must be drooling over all those new house accounts.

I just got a call from a Hightower employee I had been working with. I told her what the rumors were and she said yep, we pretty much got it right down the line. They were all called in Monday morning and told to bring a box of the stuff in their desks and they were told some BS story about the rent being too high and renegotiations had failed, that their emails had been shut down and the phones turned off and they were to take a week to 10 days unpaid leave. And they were NOT to file for unemployment. She said they said they were going to ""keep fighting this"", but she is deeply hurt by the way they did it. Apparently they had a huge training contract starting this week and had flown a consultant out for it and she's stuck out there with a plane ticket back that isn't for another couple of weeks and she hasn't been paid so one of the EMPLOYEES TOOK HER IN. Can you believe it?

FYI - If anyone has any urgent HT product issues, mainly POS, we ""may"" be able to assist. Our lead developer was previously with HT and was involved in the development of the original POS product. He has been with us 8 years, but still maintains a good working knowledge of POS. We can try and assist with any Timekeeper or T&B issues but not as well versed with those as POS. So, I can't make any promises, but if you have a client in a bind, please let me know. It's best to send the request directly to pam@oasisky.com. Thanks all!

Well this is going to get interesting. We use timekeeper internally for our billing and it expires 5/1/2012.

We've been using Time & Billing forever and are in the process of switching to value pricing. Funny how things force your hand and help speed things along...

Tip: Freshbooks.com --- love the ability to email invoices automatically, get online approvals for quotes. It's not perfect (especially if you bill 50% up front and 50% on project completion) but it's not overly expensive -- about $300 or so per year.

Well, I thought I would add my 2c in on this. We had been a longtime reseller of HT products up until around March of last year. We had a huge issue with our customers 4.4 upgrade and their Multi-Bin (MB) product. Basically when the client was live on 4.4 we had a not functioning MB module for 2 months until we decided to switch to another vendor for their MB product. Even after switching to the new vendor we found out that HT fixed their MB issues (which were BIG issues) 5 months after they were originally reported. At around the same time we received notice that their Timekeeper and Time and Billing Pro reseller maintenance (we were using both product internally) were increasing significantly...so we decided not to renew. We stopped using TK and T&B Pro January 1st. I feel sorry for the employees there as I had dealt with some good people there for many years. However early last year they have must have made some changes in their development department (they would not answer when I inquired) since the quality of their enhancements with 4.4 decreased significantly. In summary the issue that they caused with our MB customer strained our relationship with HT significantly and I am just glad we cut the ties when we did. For those of you using HT products or have customer still using them I wish you good luck...I would not want to be in your shoes.

We have one user using POS Professional.

We have three....

I wonder how many active users of all these enhancements there are ...

Hmm, @DawnAnastasi, that could be a nice Poll to put up on LinkedIn (when appropriate), or we could do it here.

HT POS poll: https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/9906069

Brian - What are you using in place of TK and T&B Pro?

Actually, on a tip from another reseller we work with we actually just use the Sales Order module. With a few little tweaks it works just fine for us. An actually I have to come to like it better, and a bit more efficient in my opinion than TK/T&B Pro. We didn't use all the features in T&B Pro. The other plus is that we don't have to wait to go to 4.5 now.

@BrianBuck , what tweaks to make SO perform as T&B (if you don't mind the query)?

Value billing... Lol

Smart arse...

Brett. We probably need a poll for HTI. Tb pro. We use it in-house

Okee-dokee: https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/9907527

Thx @brett. I would of but am mobile

Updated link for T&B Pro poll: https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/9907527 If you voted on the original poll, please re-vote here.

To answer @DebThomas and @MichaelMcDonald I just setup all of our work codes/billing codes that we had in T&B pro in Sales Order as Misc Items and setup one for each of us consultants in our office. For each billing period then we have one new Sales Order for each customer we did work for in that period. We use the promise date in the lines as our service performed date. Some basic tweaks to the S/O Invoice and some of the Open S/O by Item reports (for reviewing and approving time to be billed) and we have turned it into a pretty simplified Time and Billing system. For prepaid projects/fixed fee projects or project tracking we just use a Master Order. For the 2+ months we have been using it this way it has been a pretty efficient billing system, PLUS we can finally email invoices to customers via paperless (which we could never do using T&B Pro). WIN!

I thought about the same approach, but still need to maintain WIP. Will probably add JC into the mix, so time/expenses can be maintained in JC and billed from SO.

Egads Jobcost....The tough part there is extended comments

You're right Jim. Guess I'm still hoping JC will make it to BF someday.

What planet are you on @MarkKotyla? ;)

Why the hell are you still billing hourly?

There are a lot of people that still bill hourly.

Why the hell are you still billing hourly? => I knew that was comming at some point :)

Hey I fought it for a long time when I switched to Freshbooks for invoicing. I thought I could never use Freshbooks because I needed all those work codes and expenses that I used in the CPA world. Before switching I was on Timeslips. Found out that I did not miss the time codes. Customers did not ask for the detail.

The feeding frenzy begins...just posted on the MAS Linked In group by IIG: ""In an effort to help you, the Sage Channel Partner, Information Integration Group (IIG), has decided to offer a 50% Margin on any Hightower MBIN and POS exchange with an IIG POS Solution for Sage 100 ERP (formerly Sage ERP MAS 90, and MAS 200) in version 4.4 or 4.5. (Offer ends April 30, 2012). Please call Gary at (818) 956-3744 for more information on the offer. IIG has been developing solutions for Sage products since 1991. IIG Solutions include: Service Management, Rental Maestro, Apparel Maestro, Process Manufacturing, Multi-Bin, Credit Card Processing, Shipping and RF Warehouse Automation, Advanced Landed Cost, Multi-Currency, and much more

Wayne, there are just as many dinosaurs in technology as there are in law!

@WayneSchulz It's for a client damn it! Anyway, I still bill hourly when I have no clue what I'm getting into (which happens quite a bit). Usually, it's just for initial review or discovery. @ThereseLogeais Welcome to my world. I'm off to ride my unicorn.

I just put a poll out there for how you currently bill clients - value, hourly or hybrids

Got this today... from noreply@hightowerinc.com Since 1999, HighTower has partnered with SWK Technologies, a leading Sage developer and business partner, to better serve our mutual clients. Effective today, Friday March 23, 2012, SWK will be handling all HighTower client support, as well as supporting resellers of HighTower enhancements. SWK will provide telephone & remote support from Monday through Friday, between 8:30AM and 5:30PM Eastern time. Calls will be handled on a first come, first served basis, with special consideration to mission-critical issues. Simply call 877.979.5462, email info@swktech.com or use the SWK Support Portal at http://support.swktech.com/