Tribal Group

Tribal is a leading UK provider of consulting and professional support services with a wide range of public and private sector clients.

Case Study: Sage Integration

The problem

When Tribal approached us the Publications team was using two MS Access databases, one for their monthly magazine subscriptions and one for product orders, and all the invoicing and payment processing was done in Sage. With no integration between their databases and Sage, it was taking the equivalent of one person working a 37 hour week, 10 weeks a year, to manually create the monthly invoices and check payments. This work was shared by the whole team and an administrator, and the double-entry of invoices into Sage and inevitable error margin introduced by the manual input of data was frustrating the whole team.

The Goals

The Tribal Publications team simply needed a solution that would enable them to avoid mundane double-entry of data and manual checking of payments, and thus free up their time to concentrate on more interesting work.

Delivery

We were able to help Tribal sort out their administrative headache by providing integration between their custom MS Access databases and Sage Line 50. After a detailed analysis of the Publications team's current systems, we were able to specify exactly what needed to be done to free up their time.

The solution

• Ad-hoc orders were to be transferred from MS Access into Sage Line 50 as product invoices, and the invoice numbers of the newly created invoices were to be inserted back into a MS Access database.
• The re-invoicing of monthly subscriptions in the MS Access database was to be automated and the invoice details were to be automatically inserted into Sage Line 50.
• The MS access database was to be updated with the payment status of subscriptions based on data from Sage.
• The insertion of Sage Line 50 Account references into MS Access was to be automated where possible.
• A new function to the Access database was to be added to allow customer records in the database to be automatically created in Sage.

The Conclusion

The integration between Tribal's databases and Sage Line 50 has had a dramatic effect on the morale and smooth administration in the Publications office. The monthly invoicing and the transfer of data between their Access databases and Sage can allbe completed within minutes, and the amount of manual administration has been reduced to a minimum.