General Consultant Discussion

How many of you have had this happen? Customer: We had a power outage and weren't able to update the register. The controller is gone, but he had shown us how to run the utilities. We did that, but now our data is gone. Me: Which data? Customer: All of it. Me: Which utilities did you run? Customer: Rebuild key files, rebuild sort files, reinitialize data files. Me: Which files did you reinitialize? Customer: All of them.

OMG!

I think this one wins the prize for THIS month! Ouch!

Not quite to that extent - all of one module, such as Inventory, though. My favorite is when they merge ALL vendors into 1! Your next question is then: Do you have a backup? And they usually answer: Not recent . . .

Southwest is starting up the Wanna Get Away ads again. They definitely qualify!

Last year, we had a call where client reinitialized the inventory transaction history file.

If you think education is expensive....

@KarenOLane I always enjoy your dialog postings!

I swear I'm going to write a book, @JohnHoyt!

I might add that this was a team effort, 4 people. You'd think that someone would whip out a dictionary and look up the meaning of ""reinitialize"", which would lead them to ""initialize"". But my guess is that the definition would go over their heads anyway.

Please do! Include all of our stories in there!

@JaneScanlan This deserves the OH . . . MY . . . GOD!!!!!

Customers do the darndest things!

Now there's a title for a comedy show.

And who said the customer is always right?

The merging all vendors into one had the accounting person in tears. I assured her that it would be OK, as long as we had a backup to restore. Then she really started crying.

Worst one I ever had was a client who was trying to copy their live data into their TST sandbox. You guessed it, they went the wrong way and copied the year-old sandbox into their live company file. It was fortunate that their IT guy DID have a backup from the previous night......

Do you remember the old company copy routine? You would pick the company to copy FROM and then pick the TO company. When that first changed with the new framework, I had a couple of customers copy the new, blank company to the live company. Only one of them had a current backup. The other one spent her entire 2 week vacation rekeying 3 months worth of data for AR, AP, PR, and GL.

@LouWagner - copying data to the test company still scares me.

Wow, been done that road! Perhaps their picture on a milk carton for a month? Perhaps their picture on your web site under the tab, I didn't this this was possible. Of course, you would put a black rectangular bar over their eyes... perhaps this could be worked into MOTM as a 30 minute session - who has the most incredible customer story?? My all time favorite is the client who merged all of their customers, thought they were doing backup every night only to find out they were inserting the tape but nothing was happening. Of course, I was at their office on 9/11. Had a little perspective that day.

We are in the process of finalizing our Service Level Agreements and calculation matrices. We seriously are going to use a multiplier factor based on the abilities of the staff.

One time I did a company copy the wrong way. Luckily, this happened during implementation, so they weren't live yet. Whew! That was probably 15 years ago, and to this day I always take a deep breath and pay attention when I do it.

Then you have the defensive customers who say ""Why would Sage allow us to do that?

@JeffSchwenk same here. Especially with client data. When that last confirmation screen pops up, I stand up, take a coffee break and come back to double and triple check (again) to be sure it's right. And I always tell my clients to let ME do this for them.

@KarenOLane I'm sure your customer would not appreciate this, but I looked back on the ""team effort"" comment and burst out laughing!

There are some features that even system administrators are not allowed to do when I set up security.

@JohnHoyt, that reminds me. Back in the DOS days, we had a law firm customer where the staff accidentally typed ""del *.*"" at the c:\, not just once, but twice in one month. I recall their office manager looking at me, hands on hips, lips pursed in a sneer, and saying ""and DOS just lets us do that?

I did that once as well. I was used to typing DIR star.star to find files in the directory. One day I type DEL star.star. I was challenged with an ""Are you sure?"" prompt. Of course I said yes! About two seconds later I had the ""O Crap"" moment. Luckily, I DID have a tape back up and it DID work as well. Took me about two hours to restore that first one. As they say, Practice makes perfect. That was not the last time I had to restore a file. I was able to get the restore down to about two minutes.

Would it be so terrible if Sage first renamed the company codes you were copying TO (OLD_MAS_xxx) and then copied the data? Yeah, you might be low on disk space but this is 2017. Certainly, computer scientists have devised ways to check for low storage before copying. Same deal with reinitializing. Why not automatically rename the files first to *.old then create a blank file.

I doubt this is just a Sage issue. I imagine most other publishers have similar situations with their software, and they all expect that trained people will be dealing with these types of tasks. If the consultants are not responsible for this, then the IT staff should be, since they deal with this type of operation all the time. Accountants know accounting and should not be responsible for IT operations.

The problem with most of our customers is the accounting department is in charge of the ERP software and they have decided their mission is to save money. They are so short-sighted in this regard that they have no understanding of what could go wrong which then costs much more than what they perceive they saved.

@JohnHoyt couldn't agree with you more on both points. I never allow a customer to use the reinitialize task - way too dangerous!

Step AWAY from the utilities!

I'm a reseller, I'm am here to help, not take all of your money!!