General Consultant Discussion

Customer called during the lunch hour. When I returned her call one hour later, she said that she had called Sage in the meantime and the support person gave her wrong advice, so her GL custom financials were wiped out. Luckily for her, I know how to restore individuals files and the relationships between files. #sagebad #consultantgood

Are these the OLD custom files from the v3.X days?

Yes.

I wonder if the Sage person knew they had wiped out the files, what they said and if they tried to fix it. Or was it the fallback response - ""restore from backup and call back"".

Not to sound preachy or even give the impression that I am standing up for Sage, but they have VERY little incentive to help out with the ""ancient"" forms. They aren't part of the official conversion unless you run the ""star"" unhideGL (or something similar) to bring them over so they aren't supported. Yes, you CAN help the client out but what if you had a client that absolutely refused to let go of Lotus? Would you help them out? Or tell them to bite the bullet and get a copy of Excel installed on their workstation? Yes, **SHAME** on Sage for breaking it, then walking away without any remorse and **Kudos** for being able to recover from their mess, but it is also time for the discussion that they move on to a modern report writer and away from this 1980's DOS based dinosaur.

I partly agree with @JeffSchwenk and partly not. If you have the capability of supporting Lotus 1-2-3 because you still remember some of that dinosaur by all means, help the client. Or help with their stone-age report writer if you know how. All the while, though, encourage them to move up and realize that they, the client, may not have the capabilities or resources required to upgrade. Personally, I'm not familiar with that report writer at all but we have/had at least one or two clients who've continued to use it because they simply don't have time to use SI or don't have the money to get a license for Designer.

Sage told them to restore from backup. Not specifically what they could restore, just the whole thing, which would have been painful. This is a huge company with lots of transactions entered by lots of staff. And yes, we're in the sales phase of switching them to Intelligence. I can easily support the old DOS financial report writer, but the modern software will greatly benefit them. The larger picture though, is that *I* deserve praise and glory for saving their sorry asses. Thank you for the kudos, @JeffSchwenk. I've finally had to tell customers on versions of early 90s software from other providers that they will need to find other support, because I simply don't remember anymore, and am unwilling to spend time refreshing my memory. There's no upside for me.

Sage is sometimes our best salesperson for why clients should stick with us. We KNOW the product but more importantly, we KNOW the client and their business. Very hard to put a price on that. If the client gets that, they are a client for life. If they don't......... well they can be someone else's client for the next six months and then someone else's after that.... I struggle to remember what I did last month, let alone 15 years ago. When I used MAS 90 as an end user, my accounting supervisor was in charge of creating financials so I never really learned them. When I hung out my reseller shingle, FRx was catching the wave. Way easier to learn!!!! Five years ago, Sage Intelligence sucked so badly that I let someone else learn that. Now SI's time has come so I need to dust that product manual off the shelf... Great job @KarenOLane!!!