We had another instance this week of a customer who had unfixable errors in their accounts data. They have support from Sage directly for this software and, after running the standard tools, were told that the only thing they could do was restore back to a last good backup; this was about a week old.
They called up as they have Sage 50 Manufacturing support with us, and this came up in conversation. The support staff at Sage hadn’t asked if they used any other software alongside their accounts, so if they had carried on processing after the data restore, they would have not only had to redo a week of work but would have had a mis-match in the stock between the 2 programs. Not good when you need to despatch orders from Accounts again as part of your re-processing, but the Manufacturing had record of the stock movements from the original despatch!
We brought a copy of their up to date, ‘unfixable’ Accounts data back to the office to see if there was anything we could do to fix it, otherwise we would have found the manufacturing backup that matched the accounts one to restore to the same place.
Using some of the additional tools we have here, and our knowledge of the background tables that hold the Sage data, we were able to find a way to remove the error in their data without re-doing anything!
One phone call, an hour of our time later, and they were back to where they had been at the end of the previous day. We probably saved them a couple of days processing time, along with a host of other issues that would have arisen, by helping them.
The knock-on effect of what Sage had suggested was worse for our customer, but for any business having to redo a weeks’ worth of work would be a real bind. If ever you find yourself with unfixable errors, let us have a look to see if we can fix them – and if we can’t we know a man who can!
