TM1 Forum

Hi All,

Anyone using Sage with TM1 ?

Just wondering as someone as asked me and my initial feedback is that you can get reports to output in csv file format (good times) but you need someone to physically kick the job off ie. you can't schedule the job (bad times).

Is there anyone out there who has a workaround for this ? Does it have an ODBC that can be used ?

Help appreciated.

Ajay

Ajay,

Can you be more specific as to which Sage product you're talking about? There are quite a few.

I don't think I've ever run into an accounting package that wasn't able to at least output to CSV or some type of text file format, so you're right to make that assumption I think. And, if you want to make a more direct ODBC connection, this is typically very straightforward if the accounting package is running on top of an ODBC-compliant database like Oracle or SQL Server. Or, if the underlying data storage is more proprietary there may still be an ODBC driver provided by the vendor.

In the case of Sage's MAS 90, for example, there is an ODBC driver available for their non-SQL Server version, but I remember it being not very stable or well supported/understood when I last tried it. Still, it is definitely worth exploring in order to get a more direct link - the only other challenge you sometimes face is figuring out which table(s) you need to query to get what you need.

If you can clarify which Sage product you're working with we may be able to give you some further guidance.

Regards,
Mike

I have used both Sage (a.k.a. Best) MAS90 and MAS500. With MAS90 we did exactly what you describe: manually kick off reports with output to text file. Even though we had a lot of customization done in MAS90 by someone who knew the internals, we never had a workaround for this. (This was back in the bad old days using TM1 v6.) With MAS500 it is a snap because the MS SQL Server back end handles ODBC. I understand MAS200 offers a choice of back ends.

I worked on a client that was using Sage Line 50 and they were able to export data to flat file. I think they were doing it manually though. I'm not completely certain, it was over 7 years ago,

Jim.

I was at a client last year who had Sage Line100. This supported ODBC, but it was not a full client server implementation - more like Access. If the TM1 server can open a network share to Sage then it should be OK. In my case Sage was in France and the TM1 server was in the Middle East - not likely to work well. They've now selected SAP....

Thanks guys.

Some additional detail is that the version in question is Sage Line 200, release 5.

At this stage I'm not sure if it is using a SQL/Oracle DB or some proprietary but I will find out.

Ajay

Mike Cowie wrote:...I don't think I've ever run into an accounting package that wasn't able to at least output to CSV or some type of text file format...

You've never had the "joy" of using Baan then We had to use Crystal Reports to get anything usable out of that, thankfully i don't need to use it anymore as i no longer work on Finance data.

You've never had the "joy" of using Baan then We had to use Crystal Reports to get anything usable out of that, thankfully i don't need to use it anymore as i no longer work on Finance data.

Oh, but I have and completely forgot about it - I think I ended up writing a regular expression filtering command-line app that cleaned out the "printed" (to text file) reports' header, footer, various junk rows. I think the format of values in the report was another challenge, but thankfully that client has since moved onto Oracle.

-Mike