SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Hi again everyone,

I'm working with a company on the following setup:

Windows XP SP3 installed on 12 workstations
Windows SBS 2003 SP2 operating as server & domain controller
Sage Line 50 v10 Financial Controller running in networked mode
Sage Job Costing v8 running on top of Line 50

Both Sage products have a specific mapped drive on the server (e.g. L for Line50 data, J for Job Costing data) and are not using UNC's.

Licensing-wise the Sage products are licensed for 2 companies with 6(?) concurrent user licenses for each company.

The daily script that runs on login for each user deletes the file "C:\Program Files\Sage\Accounts\ACCDATA\Queue.dta" on the user's local machine; although nothing deletes any Queue.dta files located on the file server that Sage is running from.

OK now that you have the background, here is the problem we're having: For months now we have been seeing an intermittent issue where a user will log off (either by clicking File -> Log off, or clicking the X in the corner of the window), but the system will not realise the user has logged off. That is, the User Activity module still shows that user as being logged in. Sometimes the user shown will not be the username that the user logged in with (e.g. the user "grant" logs in on pc R12, and Line50 shows the user "manager" logged in on pc R12).

This issue has been becoming more and more frequent over the months, which may be due to the fact that we now have more office staff using L50/JC or possibly due to the fact that the system is now processing significantly more data. The issue is not restricted to any given workstation or any given user. There is no common time of day nor feature that we have noticed corresponding to the occurrence of the problem. It does not occur in one company more frequently than the other. It does not seem to be related to whether the user is using Line 50 or Job Costing.

I hope I've given everyone enough information to know where I am in diagnosing this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated as a couple of us have spent hours on this problem with no benefit at all. Our local Sage guy has been reasonably helpful but is confident that it's a technical problem & he doesn't have the necessary skills. We haven't purchased Sage Cover.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Cheers,
- Eric

Job costing uses a "phantom" user to log into Sage 50.

So user bill might log into Job costing and Sage as bill however as Job costing has to log into sage 50 it will need to use another username, this is configured when you set up access in job costing.

I usually follow the simple system of adding a J to the end of the username for the additional phantom user that needs to exist in sage.

So there will be 2 users set up in sage 50 for bill. bill and billj

In job costing user bill will be setup to use the phantom username billj to log into sage 50.

I suspect that you have this incorrectly setup, as the user manager has been left logged in after user grant has logged out, this suggest to me that in job costing grant is setup in JobCosting to log into sage 50 as manager.

I think that this feature has not been understood and someone has used the same username multiple times, in job costing.

If you log into sage 50 and job costing at the same time and go to view users, you should see that you are logged into sage 50 twice, once in your normal username and once in the phantom username used by jobcosting. I suspect that the phantom usernames are being duplicated, everyone using manager or using the same username as their sage50 id.

If this is the case, then resolving this might resolve the problem.

You should not have a script deleting the queue.dta file, this should not be needed and might be masking an important symptom.

Using the J suffix also has a useful side effect, in the sag audit trail, you can see which user posted the transaction, and if it has the j suffix, you know it was posted via jobcosting and not straight into sage 50, this can be useful to know.

Ah! Thanks for your reply once again Bruce. You're absolutely right in regards to the user setup: Job Costing was set up to use the same username in Line 50 that people were trying to log in with. When the user clicked "Remove this user from the list", it would allow them to log in anyway, but then when they logged out it would not recognise that.

I've now made a copy of each name in the Line 50 access list, prefixed each with JC_, and modified the User List in Job Costing to log in to Line 50 with the prefixed version of the username.

Thank you once again for your help.

Cheers,
- Eric