NEW Features for Xact Link for ACT! and QuickBooks

Randy Iskandar at Xact Software looks after the QuickBooks link developments and he has wrapped up the next release with the following enhancements....

• Price Level Selection; allocate the pricing level globally for invoices direct from ACT! to apply discounts for customers or apply reseller pricing margins.
  


• Quick Template Customisation; we have made it easier to make changes to the html invoice and estimate documents that get saved into ACT! and emailed to the customer. A layout editing tool allows for easier editing and alongside is a preview pane so that you can see the results of the changes.This lends itself to a template library to select a default template for the business in preferences.
  


• Xact Link for ACT! and QuickBooks is now FULLY COMPATIBLE with ACT! Opportunities from ACT! 2007 through ACT! 2010; just like Xact Link for ACT! and MYOB, the only links that are fully compatible and fully featured for Opportunities integration. So you don't have to worry about which supported version of ACT! your customer runs, the Xact link products integrate completely and No Upgrade fees apply
  


• ALL these new features delivered: 1 March 2010

More info about the ACT to Quickbooks Link

Click here to buy the ACT! to Quick books Link

Upate on NEW Features Coming Up for the ACT! to MYOB Link

The Xact Software link remains the only MYOB approved product for linking ACT! and MYOB. You are assured of accurate creation of invoices from our products.

Our next release features:

• Very Fast Client /Server operation through .Net Remoting; MYOB can be sluggish to run across a network under certain conditions.. This can be experienced in linking to MYOB data files which have a mountain of accounts history being pulled across a network to run lookups etc. Remember ACT! 5/6 lookups? MYOB operates in a similar manner. With our April 28th release we will be the first link to include modern .Net client/server technology with no need to install the server component on the PC when running locally
  


• Chart Controls, just like ACT! but better! Xact Software is bringing MYOB financial data charting direct into ACT! We have been working on charting for many months and we are finally able to provide this essential feature. Forget about importing financial data into ACT! Connect direct to the data source and draw the charts...wow!
  


• MYOB Search direct from the ACT! Lookup menu; lookup Products, Quotes, Invoices, Sales Orders etc...all within ACT!
  


• Integration of Opportunites will just get better and better....Xact Link for ACT! and MYOB is the only fully integrated link to ACT! Opportunities...You can create quotes in MYOB from ACT! opportunities, email them, attach to contacts with MYOB Product list in ACT! and it's going to get better...

ALL these new features delivered: 28th April 2010

Click here for more information on the ACT! to MYOB Link. (including video demo)

Make a Dash for it!

Have just been attending a Webinar this morning with Pat Egen from Egen Consulting.

It's been very enlightening to learn how to query the ACT! database with SQL and then build custom dashboards to display the results.

If you are using ACT!, particularly the latest version ACT! 2010, you would be amazed at what information you can display in a dashboard.

Business owners and managers are especially interested in reports. If you are collecting the data you can, in theory, report on it.

With Dashboards, the reports are live data at the time you look at it. So that means no running the report and then knowing it's out of date the minute it's printed. You can have your dashboards display as the screen that you or your sales staff see when logging into ACT!.

We look forward to developing a range of standard dashboards for our clients that will help extract more meaning and understanding from their data.

If you have any requests on for a custom dashboard, let us know.

Follow Pat on twitter www.twitter.com/pregan

ACT! Quick Tip - Using the Relationships Tab

The relationships tab is a new feature that came out with ACT! 11.0.1 and is also included in ACT! 12/2010.

It is an excellent way to record which contacts relate to each other in your database. ACT! is very good at associating contacts with companies and groups. These are helpful for 'many to one' type relationships. I.E Many contacts work for the one company, or many contacts are going to be the member of one group.

The relationships tab captures the 'one to one' contact relationships. IE. this contact is related to that one.

I use this a lot for relating contacts who refer me business to those they referred. This way I can see under a referers tab, all the people they have referred me to. I can also see the relationships they have with those contacts. E.g. I can see they have referred me to a friend, a relative, and a client.

All this information helps to recall the context of the relationship.

The best thing about this feature is that it is fast to connect two contacts together, and it is even faster to click between contacts that are connected in this Tab.

Check out the new ACT! to MYOB Link demo on Youtube.

Outlook & ACT! integration

Helped a client this morning where the integration between Microsoft Outlook and ACT! kept being lost. I would fix it and it would work that day, then drop the next day. VERY frustrating for both client and I.

With the help of this ACT! KB article: ACT! icons & tabs not appearing in Outlook, we overcame part 1 of the issue, and then with a little scripting I've setup that workstation to keep a known good copy of the ACT! preferences and use that to overwrite the current preferences on each start-up of the workstation - that solved part 2 of the issue.

The ACT! preferences are kept in %appdata%\ACT\Act for Windows\ directory.

Another possible solution is found here: Preference Settings for Word Processor, E-mail, and Customization is Not Retained after Restarting Your Computer - although not helpful for time for me.

Custom layouts with Durkin Toolkit

I've been deploying an ACT! database with custom tables using the Durkin Toolkit.

Although having done this before, I once again found that I'd forgotten to copy the customised forms.

Here is how you get the customised forms (layouts) onto the workstations and laptops using RDB's (Remote Databases) - you need to copy the files from

DatabaseLocation\DatabaseName-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

on the server hosting the ACT! database to the same location on the workstation.

Thus if your ACT! database on the server is at D:\Data\ACT\Yourdatabase.pad,

the location would be D:\Data\ACT\Yourdatabase-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

and you would copy it to the workstation with the RDB to, for example: C:\ACT\Yourdatabase-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

Hoping that helps some of you trying to find where those layouts went...

Scheduling tasks for others

When you schedule a task for others in ACT!, you get a drop-down list of people you have permission to schedule for. No problem, but what about when staff leave?

There are a couple of things to do here but deleting their user record is NOT one of them. Make the user 'inactive' - do not delete them, the reasons why are the subject for another post another time.

However, this means that they are still in the above mentioned list, you can still see them in the list of people you can schedule for.

I've seen some people rename the user from "USERNAME" to "zzUSERNAME" so that the appear at the end of the list, but it's nice to be neater, right? Yes, I'm glad you agree ;-)

In fact it is a really simple solution that works perfectly (thanks to KR for the pointer). You simply edit the user and change their security role from "Standard" (or whatever it was) to "Browse".

They now no longer appear in the list. Now that's neat.

Security on crackberries

Just reading this article at CSO on the dangers of using mobile devices and it specifically mentions the John McCain incident:

...officials with John McCain's campaign mistakenly sold a Blackberry to a Fox television reporter for US$20 in a fire sale...

News like this makes me glad that the most of our clients that use either Blackberries or Windows Mobile devices are using Handheld Contact (aka HHC) to sync their data to their handheld.

I AM GLAD because Handheld Contact has an option on the server side to "Erase data from handheld" which will erase all data sent to the handheld by HHC which is all the contact info for all the contacts.

If a client loses their Blackberry, all it takes is a phone call to their system admin (or me), a couple of mouse clicks and a large chunk of sensitive information is removed from the Blackberry.

[cross-posted to here]

Wildcard searching Lookups

I often find I want to find someone or a company in ACT!, however I can only remember part of their name - wildcard searching to the rescue.

If I do a company lookup for "outback", I only get returned a list of companies that begin with "outback".

However, if I do a company lookup for "%outback" - note the percent sign prefixing the search term, I get a list of all companies that contain the word "outback".

This is quite useful and can be used on any of the fields, not just the company field.

[Cross-posted to here]