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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

SMB Behavior - A Quick Primer on Security

Applies to: Master Builder 11.x, 12.x, 13.x

The security in Master Builder is a little bit atypical from the usual. Here is a quick primer on the key points of the basics. These basic points proabably cover about 80% of the questions we receive regarding Master Builder security.

Mini-Primer on User Rights in Sage Master Builder

The supervisor account is dedicated and the associated rights cannot be assigned to any other account. Only the supervisor account can be used for certain things including assigning access rights to each screen.
In the 7-3 screen, there are groups and users. Users are provided with a password and assigned a group. Security rights are provided through the groups. Note that there is no way for a user to change their own password, it has to be done by someone with access to the 7-3 screen.
Basic security rights such as the ability to void or save save a transaction and printing checks are then assigned to the group. This is global security right that applies to every screen the group has access to.
Access to a specific or menu item screen is given by going to the menu item as the supervisor, accessing the rights to that menu item by clicking F7. Click on the check box for each group you would like to have access to that screen and all the sub screens. Important: If no check boxes have been checked – everyone has access to that screen.
In each data entry screen, access can also be set by group to specific fields – say the salary field in the 5-2-1 screen in payroll. To set security, click on the field as supervisor, hit F7 and indicate the groups that should have access. The behavior is the same as menu items. If a user does not have access to a field, that will be maintained throughout the program. So, if a report has the salary field on it and the user does not have rights to see the salary field, they will not be able to print the report.

Labels: rights, sage master builder, security, supervisor

posted by Web Master at 11:17 PM 0 Comments

Saturday, August 1, 2009

SMB Performance - Intermittent Slow Response

In a network environment, Master Builder can exhibit very slow performance at intermittent times. In some cases, the slow performance can affect other applications running on the server. One of the common causes for this issue is the Sage Service Host.

The Sage License Server

The Sage License Server is the program that provides a user a license when they log in to Master Builder. This program must run on at least one computer on a network that is running Master Builder. Typically, it is installed on the server that has the shared Master Builder data files. The program runs as a Microsoft Windows service.

To access the Sage Service Host:
1) Login to the computer that is running the Sage License server with an administrator account
2) Click Start Run and enter "services.msc" then hit ENTER
3) Scroll to the service named "Sage Service Host"

The Issue

When working normally, the Sage Service Host is only accessed when a user starts up Master Builder and is assigned a license. This takes a very small amount of resources for the server to execute.

Periodically, the Sage Service Host can begin to "chatter" and start to use large portions of the computer CPU capacity continuously - as much as 50% or even more of the CPU can be dedicated to this service. When this much of the server CPU resources are used by a single program (or "process"), the server does not have enough resources for other programs. In addition to very slow response from Master Builder, there are other strange results that can happen. For instance, users trying to log into the server may be denied access (because the login process cannot be performed), or they may not be able to connect to printers, or they may apparently "lose" a their network drive connections. These are all a result of the server working too hard for the Sage Service Host.

When this type of behavior is exhibited, confirm that the Sage Service Host is chattering:
1) Login to the computer that is running the Sage License server with an administrator account
2) Click Start Run and enter "taskmgr" then hit Enter
3) Click on the "Processes" tab of the Windows Task Manager
4) Scroll down to the "Sage.ServiceHost.Host.exe"
5) Check the CPU usage. This is the percentage of the CPU that the service is currently using.

Typically, the CPU usage for the Sage ServiceHost.Host.exe process should be zero with infrequent peaks of a few percent. If the program is chattering, it will peak at 50% or more and hold the CPU usage continuously.

More Information and Resolution

Labels: sage license host, sage master builder, slow response

posted by Web Master at 7:31 PM 0 Comments

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Tip: Creating a secure "signed" check form

Last Tested with Sage Master Builder Version 13.2.0.3

With our larger clients, there can be hundreds of checks generated at a time for both payroll and accounts payable. Naturally, people want to create a digitally signed check form to avoid having to physically sign the checks, but there are a few technical challenges to overcome to create a signed check form that is reasonably secure. Like physical signature stamps, your signed check form can be “locked” away to help protect it from unauthorized use. With a little bit of set up, it is easy to add a signature to a check format that only the appropriate people can print.

Creating the Check Form

First, to get a good digital image of a signature, create the signature with a black felt tipped pen – a fine point Sharpie is perfect for this – on plain white paper. Sign a little larger than would be normal. A digital signature will maintain its quality much better if it is reduced from its original size when used on a form than if it is expanded from its original size. Scan the signature page with any reasonable scanner. Using a simple graphics software tool – Microsoft Paint works perfectly well – open the scanned image and crop it so that there no extra white space around the signature. Save in “Monochrome Bitmap (*.bmp; *.dib) format.

Now create your SMB check forms. To use the signature bit map (signature.bmp in this example) in your check forms, you will need to copy the file to four locations:

X:\MB7\Report Forms
X:\MB7\BMP
C:\MB7\Report Forms
C:\MB7\BMP

where X:\ is the network drive where your Master Builder data resides. (See tip on Image Files in Report Designer.)

Modify or create the new check forms using the signature file as normal in Master Builder’s form designer. Make sure to force the signature image to be proportional with the “proportion” icon in the form designer.

To Secure the Check Form

With Master Builder, the only thing we need to secure is the actual digital image of the signature. This is done using the workstation and network level file security. Have your network administrator set rights on the specific “signature.bmp” file so that only the people that should be able to print checks can see or access the file in the following locations on the network.

X:\MB7\Report Forms\signature.bmp
X:\MB7\BMP\signature.bmp

Secondly, set up local users for the people that should be able to print checks on the workstations where the checks will be printed and set the security on the file “signature.bmp” again so only those that should be able to print the signed checks can see or access the files.

C:\MB7\Report Forms\signature.bmp
C:\MB7\BMP\signature.bmp

If a user that does not have access to these files tries to print the signed check form from Master Builder, the form will print, but the signature will not appear.

Important Things to Note

Using this method to secure a check form, there are a few things to remember.

- The secure check forms can only be edited on workstations (computers) that have the digital signature copied to their local drives.
- Only someone that has network and local workstation rights to see the digital signature will be able to edit the check forms.
- Only someone that has network and local workstation rights to see the digital signature will be able to print signed checks.

(law)

posted by Web Master at 11:16 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Tip: Printing Large Quantities of W2 Forms

We have quite a few clients that print hundreds of W2’s for their employees. Using Adobe to print the W2’s makes the process work better and avoids the hassle of collating hundreds of forms.

1) Purchase your W2’s in sets. Typically, we use the 2 up, 6 part sets. A quick search on google will reveal many sources for these forms. Here is a link to one that I found easily, although we purchase the forms from many places – GreatlandProducts.com.

2) Print the W2’s to the screen and tie-out the totals page with your 941’s.

3) When ready, print the W2’s to a PDF file. You can use the Master Builder PDF printer, but I like the full Adobe Acrobat product better. Check the final page and make sure it matches the values you used in step 2.

4) Print the W2’s from Adobe Acrobat or the Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free download from Adobe). When you print, print six copies (the number of parts in each set of W2’s) without collating. The result you want is page 1 (the first two employees) to be printed six times, then page 2 printed six times (employees three and four). Be careful here as some printers have their own collating capabilities. Check the printer properties and turn this feature off if it exists before you print.

This process has the advantage of retaining a complete exact electronic copy of the forms you sent out. Also, it is much easier to re-print a single or group of employees from this document should you need to do so by selecting specific pages to print. (law)

Labels: master builder tip W2 printing payroll

posted by Web Master at 10:50 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Bug: Accounts Receivable Invoice Listing Fails

Bug: Last tested with Master Builder version 13.0.2.3

Here is one to file under bizarre and cool. We ran into this one yesterday at a client that just upgraded to Master Builder version 13. This bug seems to have been introduced with version 13 of Master Builder and, believe me, it was not easy to find!

In some circumstances, the accounts receivable reports 3-1-2-21, 22, etc. will not print a complete list of invoices for a job or a group of jobs. If you print the report for just a single job, you can get the error message “The page number you entered to print does not exist for this report.”

When we encountered this situation where an AR invoice listing mysteriously stopped without completing, we did all of our standard testing. We reindexed the files (7-4); we replaced all of the .cdx files and reindexed again; we rebuilt the data tables; we ran our own program that can test for many other issues we know can exist in a Master Builder data set. We checked for the know issues with special characters (Sage KB1725) and damaged report files. Nothing worked. Finally, we discovered that the problem was related to the long name of the job as defined in the job screen (3-5).

Out testing revealed that the AR list would stop on the page just prior to the page that a specific job would have printed on. If we printed just the identified problem job, we got the “The page number you entered to print does not exist…” error. Once we identified the problem was a specific job, we could narrow our search for the problem. It turned out that the problem was in the name.

By changing the long name of the job in the job set up screen (3-5), we found we could get the report to print. This effect was repeatable. Use the original name – the report fails. Use a different name – the report works. This is the kind of problem that drives users (and consultants) batty. Once we discovered the source of the problem, we fixed it for the client and went on with our business. Still – we had to know!

What about the job name caused the problem? So, we experimented (later) and we found the pattern. If the characters “IF (“ appear (without the quotes) in the long name of the job, we can crash the report. Why would that be you might ask. Well, we cannot say for sure, but we can speculate. The Master Builder report writer has the ability to interpret formulas. One of the allowed formulas is an “IF” statement which appears like this “IF (a=b) THEN (c).” The characters “IF (“ must be literally entered into the formula. It is possible that the SMB report writer is trying to treat a portion of the job name as a formula. The contents of the formula will not be valid as a job name, so the report writer tries to read an invalid formula and fails. Thus, the report fails.

Try it yourself. It’s fun! Just put the characters “IF (“ in the long name of a job and try to print a list of invoices (3-1-2-21 ) associated with the job you modified. If you are using version 13, you are likely to get a failed report. Remove the characters “IF (“ and the report will work. (law)

Labels: bug master builder accounts receivable ar

posted by Web Master at 9:40 PM 0 Comments

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

A Method to Generate Complex Reports

Do you – as a Master Builder user - have to spend a lot of money to automate very complex reports such as certified payroll reports? Well, the answer is “maybe not.” Here is an alternative to expensive custom reporting that your organization may be able to do with in-house talent.

Report Writers
There are, basically, three ways to generate reports from data in Sage Master Builder (SMB). The first and easiest option is to use a report writer. SMB has a built-in report writer (linked to the form designer) that is reasonably serviceable and is used to generate most of the pre-created reports in SMB. While not terribly sophisticated in formatting capabilities, the built-in SMB report writer has the very strong advantage of having many of the data relationships pre-defined. For example, if you are printing a list of accounts payable invoices, you don’t have to know which table (actpay.dbf) has the vendor names and which table has the detail lines of the invoice (acpinv.dbf). You can just point and click through the linked tables in the report writer wizard or calculation builder and you are set.

The drawbacks to the SMB report writer are primarily two. First, it is a fussy bit of software prone to crashing inexplicitly and the deeper functions of the report writer are not well documented. I have experienced what I call the dreaded “crash and corrupt” where a report with a minor modification will simply shut down never to run again – often requiring a complete rebuild of the report.

Secondly - and much more limiting for complex reporting - is that the SMB report writer can only report on a single level of detail. A report cannot be created based on a query on a subset of data. For example, the SMB report writer will not allow the user to query the accounts receivable database for all open invoices with a balance greater than 10% of the invoice total and then give a detail report of those invoices. This functionality can be simulated by using filters and queries, but this method is limited to simple reporting problems and it is very slow on large data sets.

A more comprehensive report writer such as Crystal Reports (http://www.businessobjects.com/) can be used as well. Crystal is another report writer that you purchase and install on your computer as an independent program. It can then be set up to read SMB files through the ODBC drivers in Windows. (Note – If I lost you in that last sentence, you are not likely to enjoy learning how to use Crystal.) Crystal has terrific formatting capabilities, reporting on sub-queries, and great speed. We use it extensively for reporting ourselves. The downside of Crystal is that it has a much greater learning curve and there are no predefined relationships for Sage Master Builder data. The user must know which of the 400+ tables in a Master Builder database are linked together, how they are linked, and with which key fields to write reports effectively. This is essentially programmer level knowledge that the average user will not and probably doesn’t want to know.

Custom Reports
Custom reports that use more of a programming language such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Visual Fox Pro (currently our favorite tool for this type of work), Visual Basic, and many others can be used to build complex reports. There is really no limit to what can be done with these tools because they have complete access to the SMB data and can manipulate it in any imaginable method. The only limit is time and money. Custom reports tend to be quite time consuming and expensive. Sometimes a custom report is justified - we actually write many of them. However, it is usually a report that is used frequently and is critical to business success to be economically justified.

Using Queries to Populate Spreadsheets
There is a third way to create reports that is not fully automated, but has several advantages over report writers without the investment of custom reports. This is the method of using the SMB queries to populate pre-built Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The concept is very easy and can be explained in a few steps.

- Create one or more queries in Master Builder to extract the data you want. For a few tips on how to use the SMB queries, see our recent blog entry on this issue.
- Create a pre-formatted spreadsheet with worksheets dedicated to pasting the data from the queries. The data should be in one or more dedicated worksheets and all of the analysis should be in worksheets other than the data. This will make it easy to keep the data that is updated isolated from the rest of the formatted report.
- Create a process to move the data from the query to the spreadsheet. If the results of the queries are typically small (say less than 1000 lines), a simple cut and paste is fine. If the data is very large, then it may be necessary to save the query results to an intermediate file and then import into the Excel spreadsheet.

While this is not a perfect method or 100% automated, with a well-designed spreadsheet and a little practice it can be remarkably efficient. The other advantage is that the formatting of an Excel spreadsheet can be very flexible allowing for small adjustments as needed.

Attached is a simple example of this technique with a few of my favorite Excel tricks included and functions included. The analyzed data can be filtered with the Excel auto-filter as well as sorted by any of the analysis columns. This is a simple and useful report as it is, but if you care to, there are many other opportunities to analyze just these two simple queries extended the work that has already been completed.

As an example of taking this technique to the extreme – I have attached a replica of a certified payroll report required by state of Connecticut created using this method. There are only two queries required from Master Builder to generate the data needed. This would be a very challenging report to create in any report writer. Because of the complexity of this spreadsheet, I have chosen only to show the results. (law)

Example Report from Simple Excel Spreadsheet
Simple Excel Spreadsheet Integrated with Queries
Example Complex Certified Payroll Report

Labels: master builder report writer queries excel

posted by Web Master at 9:04 AM 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Bug: When posting SR Invoices - Insufficient Stock Errors

December 19, 2007
Updated 2/17/08
Bug: Last tested with Master Builder version 13.1.0.2

Update Note: This bug was documented in the Sage Knowledgebase on 2/6/08 with KB13441.

The Service Receivables module (screen 11-2) is designed to handle the sale of parts from an inventory. Here is an interesting little bug that could drive you crazy if you didn't know how to deal with it.

With a Service Receivable invoice, a part entered in the invoice details can be charged to the control inventory account. In this case, the part quantity on hand is reduced by the amount sold on the invoice. Master Builder checks the quantity in stock and will only allow the invoice to post if there is sufficient quantity to cover all of the parts listed on the invoice. If the invoice calls for more parts than are currently in inventory, an error indicating "insufficient stock" is presented to the user and the invoice is not posted.

However, we have encountered a case where we get the "insufficient stock" error and we were not taking the parts from the inventory. This was a perplexing problem to say the least.

It turned out that if the same part number is listed multiple times on the invoice - even if the items are not being taken from stock - the "insufficient stock" error comes up. Note in this example rows 1 and 4 both have the same part number listed.

When there is an attempt to post this record as an invoice, Master Builder will return the error "insufficient stock."

We determined two solutions to this issue. The quick solution is to delete all of the part numbers from invoice details tab and then post. This works if you are not doing any reporting of sales by part number. Even then, you can use the alpha part number for reporting.

The second solution is more tedious and takes more time if there are a lot of invoice lines, but it conserves the part numbers in the invoice. First, sort the invoice details tab by the part number (This is a great little trick that can be done in a number of Master Builder grids. To sort by a column, left-click on the Part # column heading to highlight the column, then right-click in the highlighted area. Select on "Sort by Part # Column) Next combine quantities of lines with the same part number into a single line. Delete the duplicate lines. Post without an error!

(law)

Labels: bug master builder service receivables sr inventory

posted by Web Master at 8:28 AM 0 Comments