Sage 100

Hi all, I just got off the phone with James who is with Renovo, which is the company that stated up after Microsoft discontinued FRx. That said, he has told me they have an FRx Replacement, Web Based and a conversion utility to convert existing FRx Reports. I asked him for possibly setting up a webinair for the group, early March. Anyone interested?

Absolutely!

Yes!

Yes. I love it, but wish it was cheaper. (The devil you know...)

I am interested.

Yes.

+1

Yes - I'm increasingly thinking we should setup these GotoWebinars using our own GotoWebinar so we're not providing a list of emails to vendors.

Renovo works almost identically to FRx, but with some improvements. It is web-based. The conversion utility is not available to the resellers, but you send files to Renovo and they convert them. It is rather costly, and we think they need to consider the pricing again. We signed on as a reseller last June, but the eLearning was not ready until October. Since they were a new company, it took them awhile to get organized with regard to resellers and on-line training. Our plan is to use this for clients that have very extensive FRx report libraries, with multiple entities, and other complexities. Because of the high pricing we would not consider it for simple one company report packages.

@JohnHoyt What's your opinion on complexity? My head spun clear around watching SMI and I believe most of my customers will not use it. Is Renovo the same type of UI and what have the customer reactions been ? I am fine with giving the customer -- here are your options A, B, C - pick one (and telling them pros/cons). What I do not want to do is say - hey you have to use ""A"" and then for the next 12 years hear them complain about how I made them pick ""A""...

Renovo Corporation is a subsidiary of Flexi Software, which distributes their Flexi Financials applications to the banking, insurance and financial services industries. The exclusive financial report writer for their software was FRx. When Microsoft announced the demise of FRx, and indicated Management Reporter would be the new financial reporting tool, Flexi proceeded to make changes in order to adopt this for financial reporting. When it was clear that this was not going to be Microsoft's direction, Flexi made the decision to create software that was very similar to FRx in terms of the structures, look and feel. The objective was to have minimal disruption for their customers. The reason I believe the rollout from Renovo has been slower to other software users was that they were busy converting the Flexi client base, and needed to integrate and package the product for other software packages. RenovoFYI is essentially FRx in terms of how it works, and uses the same terms, such as rows, columns and organizations. It has a SQL back end and is a browser-based app with Microsoft .NET design. The installation and connection to the GL database have been improved, since with FRx if you breathed wrong connections were an issue when changing servers and/or workstations. (Yes, I know, if you really knew what you were doing, this was not a problem. :)) Other enhancements are related to automated distribution lists, packages of reports, report scheduling and online report folders. They were able to incorporate a UI that makes this more accessible than FRx was. As I previously commented, this is ideal for those users who have complex reporting structures with multiple entities and have a significant investment in their FRx reports. Cost is also a consideration. I quoted a prospect with 10 locations worldwide and a corporate entity 19 users, ten of which were viewers only and it was $15,000, plus maintenance. For anyone looking for simple custom financial reporting that does not believe they need BI, then F9 is still the most cost effective and simplest solution IMO.