Duplicate Product Records, Merge them together.

[iStevie]

Hi,

Over the last few years despite training and best efforts, a number of staff have created a lot of duplicate product records within Sage 50 Accounts Pro and also made lots of silly errors in the product references from our usual system of generating them - this is becoming an annoyance and taking a lot longer than it should to find product references to quickly add them to sales orders, Invoices and Purchase orders.

1) Is there a program or method anybody can recommend that would enable me to truly merge two product records (i.e. transfer all of the project activity from the record I want to merge into the record that I want to merge it into, and in all of the invoices/purchase orders/sales orders replace the product code with the new sole record?

2) Is there also a program/method for changing the product reference so that I can implement a new system to make all of the products easier to enter without loosing the history etc? Again, if I change the product record in the products list, it would be good to reflect that new reference in all the instances where it was used in PO's, SO's and Invoices etc whilst maintaining any comments/prices etc that were altered on the order entry screen.

3) Are there any add-ons/methods of adding more information to a product record than can be added in the Description line box? For a lot of our construction products (mostly on PO's) where a limited length description/product name field is not enough to provide a detailed specification about the product. We may for instance need to specify a product name, bespoke size (3 dimensions in mm which takes up quite a lot of space), a colour, a finish, a volume and lots of other variables that are sometimes appropriate to what we're ordering that needs specifying. Can we add lots of analysis/custom fields to a product record in any way?.... At the moment my workaround is to use the product description as an internal short description but the values that are shown on Invoices/SO's/PO's are the Web Description and Web Details fields which allow me to specify more detailed information. (the problem with this is staff sometimes duplicate a product record to create a similar product and forget to change the web details for example and they cannot double check this from the order entry screen so I'm thinking there has to be a better way to do it).

Look forwards to hearing from you,
Regards,
Steve.

[brucedenney]

Hi Smiles

1> I have a partial tool to do this, there are some manual processes that need to be done to get it to work, I could do it for you as a service.

2> Again I have a tool, it is £225 however, if you want I could do it for you as a service along with 1>

3> There are several things that may help, depending on your circumstances.

There are 2 comment lines that can have additional information added on.
You can add Message lines these add 3 more lines of text.
You can use Service Products or the S3 free text product code to have a memo box which can hold paragraphs of text instead of 3 lines, however, you need to have a properly designed layout such as the standard ones to get it to print properly, if you have tinkered with your layout it might not work.

Call me if you want to discuss my offer of a service on 1 or 2 - 01344 645950

Bruce