Tips to becoming a Sage Pastel Evolution pro

As a business management tool, ERP software is most effective when the user has a full understanding of the system’s capability. Here are some tips to help you become more efficient with Sage Pastel Evolution.

1. Trial balance

When viewing the trial balance, you may notice that certain accounts do not look familiar. These accounts can also not be located in the General Ledger Account Maintenance screen or in the Accounts SQL table.

In this example of a Trial Balance, look at the account called ‘Cost of Goods’. The length of this specific account, which is actually Cost of Goods Sold>Electronic Goods and Others is too long and is therefore being cut off as Cost of Goods on the Trial Balance report. Correct this by customising the Trial Balance report layout and increasing the width of the Account column.

2. Bill of materials break-up

There may be instances when a strict serialised Bill Master item needs to be broken up using the Bill of Materials | Breakup processing screen.

When this happens, note that you are not allowed to re-use the serial number of the manufactured Bill Master item in a new manufacturing process. This is as a result of the Current Location being permanently set to Bill of Materials in Sage Pastel Evolution, which implies that this item is no longer available for any further manufacturing processes.

Note that the bill components’ serial numbers are available for re-use in other manufacturing processes.

3. Inventory related user defined fields

You can now include inventory item related User Defined Fields on the IBT Picking Slip form in the report design screen.

However, instead of the fields starting with a ‘U’ value, the UDF value will be the UDF Description value as defined on the UDF setup screen.

For instance, a Weight UDF has been setup on inventory items. Normally the field name will be “UFIIweight” and one would expect to search for this value on the IBT Picking Slip design screen when this variable needs to be added on the report.

However, you will find this inventory Item UDF field under the ‘WHseFromItems’ data pipeline and it is listed as ‘Weight’

4. Error : Operation must use an updateable query

When setting up a new Working Set in Sage Pastel Auditor and clicking on the Finish button, the following critical error message may be received “Operation must use an updateable query”.

To overcome this, ensure that the account that is logged into Windows is a member of the PC’s Administrators group, and not the Power User group.

5. Error when importing into Bank Manager: Incorrect syntax near ‘S’

The following error message may be received when trying to import a Bank Manager import file, Incorrect syntax near ‘S’.

The reason for this is that the Bank Manager module does not allow single or double apostrophes, commas or semicolon symbols in the import file when importing. This is especially the case in csv files.

For example, one of the accounts being imported is called Harry’s on the import file. The apostrophe needs to be removed before the file can be imported successfully.

6. Error when processing depreciation batch: Error calling Toolkit.ImportGLBatch! Error:25|!

The following critical error message may appear when processing a Sage Pastel Evolution Fixed Assets Depreciation Batch and your company is setup to integrate with a Sage Pastel Partner company.

In Sage Pastel Partner, the maximum number of rows allowed on journal batches is 4999. When this number is exceeded on the Fixed Assets batch to be posted to Sage Pastel, the above error message will be displayed.

We recommend that you generate the depreciation journal batch for one period at a time as multi-period batches have a greater chance of exceeding the 4999 row limit.

7. Error when opening Evolution Bank Manager

The following error message may be received when attempting to open the Evolution Bank Manager on a workstation.

Sage Pastel Evolution generally allows special characters and spaces to be used in the SA password of the Microsoft SQL instance (using SQL Authentication). However, with Bank Manager module, the above error displays when using an ‘!’ symbol (exclamation mark) in the password value.

To avoid this from happening ensure that no exclamation symbols are used in the SA password.

8. Creating new stock items

If your Sage Pastel Evolution company has huge quantity of stock items (5000 plus), you may have noticed that the process of creating new stock items is very slow. You can increase the speed of this process by decreasing the amount of time the system searches for items.

To do this, go to Inventory | Maintenance | Inventory Defaults and click on the Inventory tab screen. Tick the Require filter start option and set the Length to at least 2 characters. This will significantly speed up the process of creating new stock items.

9. Creating quick shortcuts to access frequently used functions

To save time in daily processing you can set keyboard shortcuts that allow you quick access to functions that you frequently make use of.

To set this, simply right click on the function displayed on the main screen and select Add “Function name” to Favourites. This will create a shortcut to the selected function in the Favourites menu and also assign a keyboard shortcut to this function.

For example, if processing tax invoices is part of your core daily function, you could add Tax Invoice as a favourite for quick access. You will find ‘Invoice’ in your Favourites menu and you can quickly access tax invoices by pressing the Ctrl + 1 keys.

10. Creating new lot numbers

Follow this process to create a new Lot Number for a lot number item:

1. Go to the Inventory | Transactions | Adjustment screen and select the relevant stock item. Complete all the relevant fields such as the Transaction type, Transaction reference, Adjust Quantity on Hand / Adjust Unit Cost option etc but leave the Lot Number field unchanged

2. Select the Process button

3. Select Yes on the Inventory Adjustments “…. screen that opens

4. Enter the new Lot Number and Expiry Date (if relevant) and click on OK