By being selected as one of the regional Sage Customer Development Centre’s, covering the important London and South East area, Pythagoras are ideally placed to help your organisation make the transition from Sage 50 to Sage 200. If your business is thinking of upgrading your sage business software for a more streamlined solution like Sage 200 or you are frustrated that your current sage software is not meeting your needs, then Pythagoras can assist your company with the process of changing your existing Sage accounting software.

The Sage CDC team at Pythagoras are among the UK’s most experienced and skilled in IT and business issues, many of whom have worked with Sage for many years. As a Sage Customer Development Centre, Pythagoras offer reassurance by having a proven track record of working with and supporting Sage 50 customers through everything from straightforward upgrades to more complex migration projects.

Customer testimonial

“Working within the confines of Sage Line 50 for so long meant we needed someone to show us just how limited we were by our own expectations. Our trainer offered suggestions on how best to utilise Sage 200 and helped us to see the bigger picture when it came to our accounting. Their helpdesk continues to support us and offer advice and help with things I cannot do for myself. Their remote access system is also a great help with anything too complicated, as they can see what is on my screen even if I cannot explain it! I now have a ‘never say never’ attitude to the system and have not come across anything as yet which we cannot do,” says Ellen Jeffery, Account Supervisor for Serenity Holidays.

5 Reasons to work with Pythagoras as your Sage 50 to Sage 200 Customer Development Centre.

1. Pythagoras offer a proven track record with migrating sage 50 customers to Sage 200, ranging from complex systems to straightforward upgrades.
2. Our skilled Sage CDC consultants offer unrivalled experience and knowledge so your solution is delivered on time and within budget.
3. Pythagoras is supported by sage and we have instant access to their full support and training programmes.
4. As well as being an experienced Sage business partner, we also offer unrivalled expertise in CRM and Business Intelligence.
5. We pride ourselves with delivering exceptional customer service and our support and help desk will always be on hand to help you if you have any queries.

Attend our latest Sage 200 taster day in London

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After a survey conducted by Sage identified 60% of Sage 200 customers use Blackberry’s; because of Blackberry’s being the ‘always on’ choice and the superior battery life and protected data thanks to their
128 bit encryption Sage 200 mobile supports data access via the following Blackberry series:

- Blackberry 9000 Series
- Blackberry 8900 Series
- Blackberry 8520 Series

With the initial release of Sage 200 mobile Sage are providing data relevant for four key users of the Sage 200 Suite:
- Managing Director/Owner
- Financial Director
- Sales Representative
- Project Manager

Sage 200 Mobile is designed to allow read only searches for the following:
- Customers
- Customer Transactions
- SOP
- Stock Items
- Suppliers

Furthermore, Sage 200 for Mobile allows views via workspaces, providing a rich and detailed view of different data, meaning specific views for customers are able to be developed meaning users are not limited to what simply comes out of the box as with similar systems.

The standard views available include the following:
- Sales Revenue Position
- Cash Position
- Project Position
- My Sales Summary

In conclusion Sage 200 Mobile allows the following:
- Increased productivity
- A more integrated business
- Empowering the workforce
- Peace of mind
- Greater responsiveness
- Flexibility

Overall the addition of Sage 200 Mobile to Sage 200 v 2010 adds another dimension to the package; further supporting Sages ability to offer flexible and customisable solutions to the business world.

For more information on Sage 200 v2010’s release and other Sage products please contact one of our Sage experts on 01628 519 000 or by emailing info@pythagoras.co.uk.

Jeremy Cook, Sage sales manager at Pythagoras commented on the continued success of the days, stating “The Sage 200 taster days have been a great success so far, the location provides an intimate and inspiring setting allowing customers or business individuals an interactive session showcasing the benefits of customised Sage 200 software from Pythagoras.”

The taster days are suited to companies not currently utilising Sage software who are looking to integrate company wide accounts and CRM in one solution; as well as existing Sage Line 50, MMS and Sage Line 100 customers who are looking to upgrade with the end of life support for Sage Line 100 expected in the coming months.

A key feature of a Sage 200 partnership with Pythagoras is the unique, customised workspaces offered by Pythagoras; the works order workspace provides a visual aid for shop floor planning, giving work order assessments at a glance while the stock profitability workspace allows all relevant information to be housed on one screen with the ability to drill down into key figures quickly and easily with just a few clicks.
Overall, the Sage taster days have demonstrated how Sage 200 software can be utilised to your benefit to solve challenges facing; finance, sales and marketing, operations and customer care services as well as showcasing how your organisations profitability, efficiency, internal and external communications can be improved through integration of these functions.

Next Pythagoras Sage 200 taster day – April 14th 2010

About Pythagoras
Pythagoras communications has enviable experience in deploying, creating and understanding your individual Sage 200 needs. More than 300 Sage customers nationwide have discovered how the Pythagoras approach adds value to their business. These are drawn from a diverse range of sectors and markets and we have specialist teams with specific expertise in each. Pythagoras has an enviable combination of extensive, multi-sector experience and a reputation for cutting edge technical development and innovation.

Our Microsoft CRM experts were also on hand throughout to answer questions and enlighten visitors with troubleshooting advice and tips on how to improve their Microsoft Dynamics CRM experience.

If you were unable to attend the TFM&A Exhibition this year our experts are available to discuss your individual requirements and to give demonstrations of the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Furthermore, a brief outline of just some of the advantages Microsoft Dynamics CRM brings to the 8 verticals in which we showcased can be seen below:

Membership Software
• Highly configurable membership system for your individual business needs while also extending the reach of Outlook by turning it into a effective tool for customer relationship
• Membership software reporting and business intelligence has reached a new level of importance

NHS and Healthcare
• Improved Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM)
• Proactively manage patients, improving productivity

Not for Profit
• Improved targeting of areas and customers with full profiling and segmentation of data
• Full membership and fundraising features

Insurance
• Comprehensive organisation, contact, and deal tracking to enable you to see everything about your customer, improve relationships and ultimately customer retention.
• Workflow and Process automation that will automate key business processes in the business

Media
• Profile your audiences more effectively
• Develop deeper relationships with advertisers and track complex interactions with content licensees and content providers

Education
• Improves full student lifecycle management, from recruitment to alumni and beyond
• Improves communication across internal departments and externally, enhancing the ability to manage teacher progress and build consistent external relationships with key stakeholders

Manufacturing
• Gain insight and provide channel partners the information and tools they need to drive demand for your products
• Shorten the sales cycle by effectively managing and assessing opportunities in your sales pipeline

High Technology Organisations
• Drives innovation and success through accurate understanding of products and trends and enabling manufacturers to fully maximise internal and external communication channels between the likes of marketing teams, customers, suppliers and manufacturing departments.

Pythagoras has been a Microsoft Gold Partner since 2008 with over 60 staff on hand to help provide solutions and support for your individual needs. Based out of Maidenhead, Berkshire with offices located in central London near Trafalgar Square Pythagoras Communications has the enviable success and experience desired by those looking for a customisable CRM solution.

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The enhanced communication tools and individual campaign and project listings easily created within Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows Charities and Associations to maintain contact through a number of means with their respective donors and stakeholders easier than ever. The enhanced personalised communication and relationships tools can help benefit both significantly over the long term; vital with the level of competition and exposure amongst Charities and Associations locally and nationally.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows communications via methods such as fax, email, telephone and post, all of which are customisable to individuals’ wants and needs, thus maximising the customer satisfaction and relationship quality as well as improving Charity and Association staff efficiency and productivity when producing external and internal communications.

Furthermore, the enhanced targeted marketing capabilities which Microsoft Dynamics CRM brings can fully maximise charities looking to market their benefits to correct targeted segments, especially vital when looking for potential legacy donors and trustees, two areas key for charities looking to sustain their income and make a difference long term. Microsoft Dynamics CRM saves time and important resources which are often wasted on blanket campaigns often targeted at the wrong potential donor, also giving a potential negative perception of the charity.

Lastly, Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows for charities to track the progress of campaigns, assign potential donors to specific campaigns with the ability to drill down into live and archived data, important when analysing market and geographic trends.

A reminder of some of the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Charities and Associations:

• Multi-Company, Multi-Currency and multi-lingual, multi relationship
• The ability for quick turnarounds on campaigns (i.e. quick campaigns and emergency appeals can be made)
• Complete integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office software
• Membership and fundraising features
• Reducing costs and lead times for campaigns
• Ability to deliver a focused campaign to selected individuals to make them feel valued
• Automate reminders for subscriptions and memberships

Founded in 1999 Pythagoras Communications Ltd has experienced unprecedented growth and success into one of the UK’s leading Microsoft CRM solutions providers in the UK with over 150 customers from a wide range or sectors such as Insurance, Education, not for profit and Healthcare benefiting from our portfolio of solutions, being able to control every aspect of their business. A Microsoft Gold Partner since 2008 and over 60 staff on hand to help provide solutions and support for your individual needs. Based out of Maidenhead, Berkshire with offices located in Central London near Trafalgar Square Pythagoras communications has the enviable success and experience desired by those looking for a customisable Microsoft CRM solution.

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Sage 200 Wholesale and Retail can help overcome a retailers business issues in the following ways:
• Time saving – automated routines and touch screen terminals with automated transaction updates and product look-ups
• Cost saving – addressing your business issues quickly and helping reduce inefficiencies, to deliver rapid ROI
• Security – by controlling everything from prices, credit authorisation, merchandising, reordering, etc. providing you with the assurance that your business is protected whenever you’re away on business or holiday
• Price pressures – helping cut operational costs across your business and driving sales and stock rotation so you can increase the value of each sale and stay ahead of the competition
• Reporting – providing management with insight into the decision-making needed to run an efficient operation

Furthermore, with the retail sector being fiercely competitive the streamlining of all business processes and the 360 degree view given by Sage 200 from initial product buying through distribution , marketing, sales and reporting fully optimises businesses, giving a vital competitive edge over competitors not using Sage in retail.

The merchandise management system within Sage 200 Wholesale and Retail contains some of the following features which can help take your retail capabilities to the next level:

• Company Hierarchy: The ability to map your logistical structure and support the way you operate is vital to a company’s efficiency and productivity
• Merchandise Hierarchy: Similar to company hierarchy; applies to product ranges, styles, colours and seasons of product (e.g. summer & winter ranges)
• Promotions Management: Enables you to increase stock and manage stock levels across 1 or multiple stores during promotional periods where demand is generally greater for those individual products. Being able to manage this across all stores allows brand and product consistency across all stores.
• Allocations and dispatch: Allocations to stores can be controlled as or when your hierarchy dictates. A simple process which allows control over stock movements.
• Drill downs: Key business information and the ability to drill down as far as transaction level to view information is available.
• Budgetary control: The ability to view graphically your budgets and there performance against live actuals. Furthermore, with the ability to drill down on up to five years of data trends and market movements can be more easily identified and changes can be made accordingly.

Overall, using Sage 200 in retail will enable your business to go to the next level and potentially gain an important competitive edge over your competition. For more information on Pythagoras and how our expertise in Sage 200 software can benefit your business please call 01628 519000 or email info@pythagoras.co.uk.

Pythagoras is an experienced business solutions provider for Sage 200 and Microsoft CRM with offices in Maidenhead, London and Manchester. More than 350 Sage customers nationwide have discovered how Pythagoras’s expertise adds value to their business. These are drawn from a diverse range of sectors and markets and we have specialist teams with specific expertise in each.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM features the option for users to create “quick campaigns” in the marketing or sales areas of CRM; quick campaigns allows users to create a list of contacts, accounts or leads which can be followed up with the following marketing activities:

• Email Marketing
• Faxes
• Calls
• Campaign Mail

Microsoft Dynamics CRM also offers further planning, execution and productivity benefits such as:

• Plan and track activities, tasks, budgets, and details for each marketing activity.
• Tailor messages and offers to highly targeted lists.
• Use embedded Mail Merge capabilities to instantly send mass communications.
• Track, manage, and optimise search-engine marketing efforts.
• Track responses across communications channels, linking them to campaigns and lead sources andConvert responses to leads and opportunities with a few mouse clicks.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM also allows the user to block contacts from receiving marketing materials such as emails, thus maintaining the relationship and not damaging relationships with established clients or risking the potential of negative WOM from cold leads who do not appreciate the junk emails.
Furthermore various third party applications such as Exact Target integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM which allows the user to further personalise and analyse open and click through rates of emails being composed and sent.

The range of third party add-on’s combined with the integration to staple Microsoft software such as Excel and Outlook makes Microsoft Dynamics CRM the perfect platform to take your companies email marketing capabilities to the highest level.

About Pythagoras
Pythagoras is a company that is experienced in providing Microsoft xRM (Anything Relationship Management) and Microsoft CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Accounts and integrated business solutions for businesses across a broad range of industries and products. Pythagoras is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gold Partner with offices in London, Maidenhead and Manchester.

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Note: You must have Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to apply roll up 8 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data Migration Manager. There is also a separate Microsoft update aside from the roll up for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 available in all supported languages which Microsoft recommends downloading.

Update Rollup 8 supports importing / exporting customizations to / from CRM deployments with the following rollups installed: Update Rollup 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

If a CRM deployment does not have a rollup installed, or has Update Rollup 1 installed, you should not export / import customization from / to a system that has Update Rollup 8 installed.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rollup 8 affects the following CRM components:

• Data migration
• Outlook Client
• Email Router
• SRS Connector
• CRM Server

Although tested with Microsoft Office 2010 Microsoft CRM 4.0 does not support 64 bit versions of Office 2010. However, With Update Rollup 8 installed, Microsoft CRM E-mail Router Service will support Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Rollup 8 hotfixes and updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM must be configured manually; below we outline a selection of the issues that have been fixed:

• When you click the Refresh button to update the grid, items are unexpectedly added on the top of the list.
• A blue page is displayed instead of the Report Filtering Page when Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) is enabled.
• The Data Migration Wizard fails when it tries to validate files if the User entity contains a Money type attribute.
• After you install Update Rollup 3 or Update Rollup 4, you cannot add a user to more than one organization in the same deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM if the user exists in a child domain.
• When you create a report in Microsoft Visual Studio that has a hidden parameter, and then you try to run the report while the client is offline, the hidden parameters are displayed. When you go online again, the parameters are no longer displayed.
• After you install Update Rollup 3 or Update Rollup 4, you cannot add a user to more than one organization in the same deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM if the user exists in a child domain.
• You can change sent and received e-mail messages by using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Software Development Kit (SDK).
• Users cannot assign activities after the activities are deleted from a queue.

Roll up 8 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c53b2916-6b93-4092-bdd3-a394c96ca000

For further information on Pythagoras Microsoft CRM solutions or and to speak to one of our experts call 01628 519 000, email info@pythagoras.co.uk or visit www.pythagoras.co.uk.

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1. A quicker way to enter multiple addresses. If you have more than one contact at one company you don’t have to type in each address separately, once you create an account record and enter the address data under Details, select Contacts. Click New Contact. You’ll notice that the Parent Customer information is automatically linked.

2. Using the “print view” to look up records. With a record up on your screen, simply using the print button towards the top left will give you a snap shot of all the account details, something perfect if you want to quickly see some information from the record.

3. Place your Outlook contacts into Microsoft CRM. Outlook, the staple of most peoples daily work gives you the option to “track” up to 25 email contacts at a time in Microsoft CRM. The option for this is in your personal options on the Synchronisation tab.

4. Form assistant pane key. When opening an activity or opportunity and you need to quickly access the form page which is usually found on the right side of the window just simply press Ctrl + shift + F to open it immediately, saving yourself a few seconds.

5. Store your Scripts in Visual Studio. Make sure you have a copy of all on load or on change scripts in Microsoft Visual Studio in a ‘Form Scripting’ project. This allows you to have all your scripts in a single place for Backup, Version Control and Future Reference.

6. Use a Dashboard. Often users will want to avoid screen-clicking through multiple screens to reach the data they require. A one-stop-shop dashboard that lists all the crucial day to day data in a ‘home’ page format can be incredibly useful in boasting User Adoption, which is crucial to the success of a CRM project.

7. Multiple Column Sort in 3 steps. 1. Click on the first column header 2. Hold down SHIFT key 3. Click on the second column header. Now you will have second column as the sub-group of first column and you are able to sort a number of columns till you get the right data groups.

8. Multiple Windows. Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows multiple windows to be open at the same time, from differing areas of Microsoft Dynamics CRM; this feature increases productivity further and is rare in other CRM systems.

9. Customisable Account Views. The ability to customise your individual view and to save this along side the normal view makes exporting certain data along with other activities such as label printing and mail merging significantly easier. Under accounts simply click on advanced find –> edit columns; the features there allow the user to define columns position and decide which will appear on their personalised view which is available under the “view” drop down menu.

10. Auto complete calendar. Simply filling out the day and month and Microsoft Dynamics CRM will auto complete the year providing the date is not in the past in which case it will auto complete with the next calendar year. This saves using the calendar date button every time.

About Pythagoras
Pythagoras is a company that is experienced in providing Microsoft xRM (Anything Relationship Management) and Microsoft CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Accounts and integrated business solutions for businesses across a broad range of industries and products. Pythagoras is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gold Partner with offices in London, Maidenhead and Manchester.

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Benefits of electronic document management
• Increase in productivity with the ability to find electronic documents at a significantly faster rate compared to filed.
• Reduction in printing and paper costs while also allowing data and documents to be accessed at home, away from the office.
• The ability to send statements and invoices directly via email (PDF of TIFF format) and configure which clients receive printed statements and which receive them via email or both from within Sage 200
• More office space thanks to space being currently used for hard copies being feed up
• Your company being more “green” due to the reduction of paper and ink supplies
• Reduction of errors – the electronic holding of documents reduces errors from hand written forms and the subsequent re typing of hand written forms; especially in areas such as HR and the writing of handwritten employee forms
• Up to a 30% reduction* in time spent on administration when using paperless administration

*According to SHRM Human Capital Benchmarking Study, 2006

Pythagoras is an experienced business solutions provider for Sage 200 and Microsoft CRM with offices in Maidenhead, London and Manchester. More than 300 Sage customers nationwide have discovered how Pythagoras’s approach adds value to their business. These are drawn from a diverse range of sectors and markets and we have specialist teams with specific expertise in each.