I am a Simply Accounting by Sage Certified Consultant and Development Partner. Besides providing Simply Training and Support to a wide range of clients, I develop reporting solutions utilizing Simply and the Microsoft Office© suite. I have been a user of Simply since its Bedford days in the ‘80s.
As well as being a partner in a bookkeeping practice, managing partner of a real estate investment group and providing controller services to a number of clients, I am also an active contributor to the Simply Forum.
I look forward to the opportunity to provide my thoughts on life and technology in the accounting community. If you have questions or ideas let’s hear about them and we’ll discuss them.
March 2009 - Posts
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Printers
Sometimes printers can be the most frustrating piece of equipment in the office. Why is it that when you are on your way out the door to a meeting and running tight for time, the printer decides to not work? Hint - it's connected to a PC.
A number of years ago, I owned a state of the art, latest and greatest, widest (12" feed)) colour inkjet printer. That $1,200 printer caused me so much grief - often taking 10 minutes to cancel a print job - that I gave it to a local school to sell at a garage sale. Asking price was $25.00!
I know that lots of Simply users have printing problems because there are over 600 posts on the Forum about printing and printers. Some issues are program based but more often than not they are related to printer settings. The Forum is a great source for troubleshooting printer problems as well as the Knowledge Base.
One of the most common complaints that we see with Simply is the slow displaying of reports on the user's desktop. This often happens when the printer that is chosen under the Reports menu is connected to a computer other than the user's. The display function in Simply attempts to display the report that you have requested in the layout that you have set up on the chosen printer. Simply communicates with the printer, gets its' settings and then displays the report.
You can test to see if that is what is causing the issue by Adding a New Printer under Printers & Faxes on your Start Menu. Choose the Generic/Text Only printer and test the reports with it. Usually the display is instant. This test will let you know that the little inkjet on the other side of the office along with your current network hardware is just not up to the task. Another option is to physically connect the printer you are trying to use directly to the user's machine.
Remember that it is not necessarily a Simply issue; run a few tests, check your actual printer settings and your frustration level with printers might just get a bit more bearable.
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Downloading Updates From Simply Accounting
Several times a year, we all have to download updates for Simply Accounting versions that we have on our systems. Through experience, I have found that it is a good habit to store these downloads on your server or a in seperate folder on your computer that you can backup to an external device or location.
The reason for this is that computers do eventually expire or get replaced. Sometimes computers get infected with viruses and the hard drive has to be reformatted/wiped clean. When this happens, you have to install Simply Accounting (and many other programs) onto the 'new' computer. Depending on when this occurs, the updates that you have installed over time have upgraded your Simply database to a new Release level - B, C, D, etc. So while you may still have the original Simply program in a box in the back room, it will likely only be Release A. With recent versions of Simply, Release A will not open later releases of the same version.
The easiest thing to do is to download the updates from Simply's site, However, if you were running a version of Simply that was more than 2 years old you would not be able to do this because it will no longer be available for download. If you had stored your updates in a backed up directory as you received them, you could retrieve the updates from the backup media and be running again quickly.
This process is also very useful if you have a number of computers to update with a Product Update from Simply. Download the file once from the Simply site to a shared drive on your network. From there, each machine can be updated quickly, saving each user from having to download the update from the website.
This same procedure also works well for the actual installation of the program when you have multiple licences - i.e.- 5 user Enterprise. You can legally make a backup copy of a Simply Accounting CD onto the server. From the server the program will install much faster than directly from installation CD.
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