One of our companies is a reasonably heavy user of Sage Line 50 and I’m amazed how much it has slowed down in the last year and the key seems to be it’s database back-end. I don’t know what Sage use but I wrote a Management Information System for the company to give salesmen a history of a quotes, orders and invoices which accesses the Sage files through Sage’s own ODBC connector. When I first installed the system at the beginning of last year, it took 2-3 seconds to load a customer’s history. It now takes over 20s!
Having exhausted any straight-forward ways to speed Sage up, such as excluding it’s files from Anti-Virus scans and so on, I decided that I would take a snapshot of the Sage data twice a day into a MySQL database since the MIS doesn’t need live data, a few hours old is absolutely fine. The performance against the MySQL database is at least 100 times quicker than against the Sage data. The difference is staggering! Both Sage and the MySQL server on are the same physical machine and they are operating through the same network infrastructure yet MySQL stamps all over Sage in performance terms.
Anyone know what Sage’s database back-end is? Is it bespoke or just carefully disguised? Either way, it’s performance is pretty poor.
According to todays news, drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline are announcing over 6000 job losses. If you believed the spin, including the BBCs report, it’s all tied in with other job losses resulting from the current recession. It is clear beyon the spin, however that this is due to increased competition and would be happening anyway. It seems that the the recession is a great cover for getting rid of staff in order to “cut costs and boost profits”!
According to some people, the UK economy is “finished”. These opinions are mainly from the US and none more vocally than Jim Rogers, one of those uber-investors who have done very well for themselves and are now somehow given authority to comment on the world stage. You can see an interview with Jim Rogers here in which he says that the UK’s financial system is finished and sterling will fall further and the UK is not worth investing in. However when asked why, if he’s so sure of his opinion, that he’s not making money out of the fall in sterling he stutters and fumbles and them claims he “missed the boat”.
You all know my opinion on analysts and commentators like Jim Rogers, they have no idea what’s happening and to what degree it will continue. The situation is so vast and has so many variables that it cannot be predicted and forecasted. I’m sick of the lot of them!
I have one simple, blunt response to this man’s opinion on the UK: Fuck You!! This entire problem started in the US with dodgy mortgages sold around the world. The US financial system sent a toxic wave through ours. US manufacturing is utterly inefficient and their flagship companies including Ford, GM and Chrysler have been trading insolvently for years with no-one brave enough to let them collapse because of the fallout which would occur in their “great” economy.
Blind patriotism will not get the US and world economies out of their hole. I’ve maintained all along that what is needed is optimism, drive and simple level-headedness, a view shared by a few commentators. Turnover at one of my companies is currently less than 25% of what it was a year ago and we’re not going anywhere. We’ll still be here when all this is over and it infuriates me when the media concentrates on the “doom” of a retailer’s sales falling 3% when it doesn’t really matter. Get a grip and start looking to the future!
It seems common sense regarding media frenzy over the downturn may at last be prevailing. Two of the UK’s largest mortgage lenders, Halifax and Nationwide have announced that they will not be making further predictions of house prices throughout 2009 because “things are changing so rapidly in the market, which makes it very difficult to forecast.”
And they finally admitted that “One consideration for the industry is that predictions of further big falls may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, undermining the confidence of potential buyers who might be afraid of a fall in the value of their homes.”
Now if only some of the other crystal-ball gazers would follow suite we might make some progress.
Another day, another Vista incompatibility. This time I found that Sage Accounts 2007 has an issue when running on Vista. It’s not a terminal issue but it’s certainly an annoyance. When you have the customer or supplier list loaded, you can normally doubl-click on an account to open it’s details or select an account and click ‘Record’. On Vista this will only give you a blank form instead of the account details.
Our Version of Sage 2007 is 13.02.17.0126
Sage article 15117 acknowledges the problem and reports that the only workaround is, when the details form is loaded, either type in the account number or select it again from the drop-down list. If you have a lot of accounts, the drop-down list does not show enough entries to be very efficient so the best way is to type in the account number.
The Sage article does not mention which version you need to upgrade to to fix the problem. I have asked Sage if their is a fix available and am awaiting their response.
Update: The answer from Sage is that it is fixed in Sage Accounts 2008 so it’s upgrade or put up with it!
I had money in the now collapsed Icesave bank and so did my mother. Not huge amounts but enough to be concerned about. It took a few weeks for the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme to get things organised but we now both have our money in our bank accounts and the procedure has been smooth and effective. All we are waiting for now is an ISA certificate in the post which we are assured will be received within two weeks.
In these unprecedented times, the FSCS is to be commended. I’m sure their communication systems were put under sever pressure from worried investors but I never felt the need to contact them, relying instead on their website announcements and online news sites. Has everyone else’s experience with the FSCS been positive or have we just been fortunate?
Update: ISA certificate arrived in the post 11th December.
In the news almost daily now we have some analyst or think-tank or self-indulgent quango spouting their theory on how bad the UK and world recession will be and how long it will last. Growth figures are thrown around and the UK gets ranked against other countries based on how it will cope with the recession. Apparently the UK economy will shrink all the way through 2009 and will be hit harder than most other countries by the world recession.
I have a message for all of these analysts: You know nothing! In every one of your statements you make a short disclaimer somewhere to the effect that because of the unprecedented nature of this downturn it is very hard to make predictions and yet you still make them and you make them sound so accurate as well!
We have spent years studying the weather and we have vast supercomputers constantly analysing it. We can measure and record what weather systems are around and where they are heading. Yet if you look out of your window on a daily basis and compare it with the weather prediction, how often is it actually accurate?
The analysts and market commentators seem to think that they can predict the duration and nature of a global recession which is based on that most unpredictable facet of human nature, fear. How can they possibly attempt to judge the reaction of billions of people in thousands of cultures. The truth is that they can’t and by making alarming predictions of a severe downturn lasting throughout 2009 they are simply compounding the fear which people already have following the troubles in the banking industry.
I say shut the hell up and let’s see how quickly the fear dissapates.
Well that was a shock! The Bank of England finished their two-day meeting this morning and announced a 1.5% interest rate cut. Even the most optimistic of analysts only expected a 1% cut and most people, myself included, thought that they’d play it safe at 0.5% instead. At 3% the interest rate is now at it’s lowest point since 1955 and and it is the largest single reduction since a 2% cut in 1981.
I only hope that such a dramatic and unexpected move will prompt some optimism and courage from the banks and the markets in general. It will clearly hit sterling hard but it is so important that banks start lending again, borrowing rates are reduced and as a result the economy gets a much needed kick start.
If the banks don’t pass this rate cut on to customers and the markets don’t respond positively then every senior manager in the commercial financial sector should be sacked. Bankers and traders have spent years bragging about their skills and nerve in the marketplace yet now that their mistakes have come back to haunt them, all of that courage and bravado appears to have evaporated. It’s time for them to stand up and grow a pair!
All companies have audits carried out from various institutions from time to time, from annual accounts audits to Revenue and Customs inspections. However, since the beginning of September, I’ve had an RBS Invoice Discounting audit and a full two day Revenue and Customs VAT inspection at the manufacturing company and an HBOS Invoice Discounting audit at the packaging company. Today I’m in early to get ready for an RBS Invoice Discounting audit at the packaging company because they will be taking over the facility from the end of the year. That’s four audits/inspections in just over a month!
The Bank audits are just routine inspections of our records and systems to ensure that we are operating our invoice discounting facilities correctly. They are not overly burdensome but do require some preparation and take at least a full day to complete so there’s a significant overhead involved. The VAT inspection came out of the blue since we had a minor import/export inspection last year which found that everything was in order so I wasn’t expecting Revenue & Customs to bother us for a few more years. Any Revenue and Customs inspection is quite nerve-racking as not only are your systems and records “on trial” but as a Director you have some personal liability should anything be found to be amiss. Fortunately it went smoothly with only a couple of mistakes in invoice coding and a claim to input VAT disallowed resulting in a bill for £5k.
The input VAT disallowed was for a solicitors invoice from last year. Our Managing Director at the time left and was required to sign a Compromise Agreement which binds his termination package. A company is legally obliged to pay for legal advice for the employee signing a Compromise Agreement so it was invoiced to the company. It is not, however, according to Revenue & Customs, allowed to reclaim the VAT on this legal advice since it was for the benefit of the employee, not the company. I’m not convinced but it’s their rule so I’m stuck with it!
Hopefully, after today’s audit, I’ll be free for a while. I’m a little tired of having my companies poked and prodded with an inquiring stick, particularly in such a compressed time-frame as a single month. It’s not like business is easy at the moment as it is without the extra burden. Fortunately, I have a week off next week to unwind.
All I have to do now is to try and improve the cashflow which is still extremely tight in the current economic climate.
Work is busy at the moment, but unfortunately business isn’t. My staff are busy chasing money from customers who are taking longer and longer to pay each month. There is a real tightening of cashflow in the UK at the moment and I don’t see it easing in the near future. Every customer is waiting for cash from their customer before they can pay us and we’re having to do the same with our suppliers. It’s a tightening circle.
I also have a new website project just starting for one of my companies, a full e-commerce packaging store. We’re only at the quote stage so far and the first quote in was over £55k just for coding without the design and branding which seems significantly over the top. Surely most back office e-commerce website scripting is boilerplate by now?
My assistant is settling in well and my routine accounting workload is slowly diminishing with the backlog of management accounting reporting now almost caught up.
As we head into the autumn and winter, business is going to get tougher as it always does in our business sector and the usually more profitable months in the run up to the slowdown haven’t happened this year for obvious reasons. Unless the financial sector, government and media start being a bit more ambitious, it could be a lean winter. Mistakes have been made, losses have been written off, it’s time to move forward!
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