I have this week started to use a lovely new PC, and so have had to install all my software from scratch.  Having used ACT! 2011 previously with the Sage and Accounts linked in the ‘old’ way I thought I would now take the plunge and add the new Accounting Integration facilities to my Sage 2012 and ACT! 2012.

Setting up Accounting Integration in ACT

Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle in ACT!  The new system links with SData from Sage, and ACT could not see my Sage data in order to link the software.  Researching the problem further it turned out that the problem was caused by the way we originally set up our Sage link to the data on our network.  This would not be a problem for single user Sage on one PC.

When we first linked to our data on the server Sage best practice was to use mapped drive letters to refer to where the data was stored.

k:\siliconbullet\Sage Data\Company000\accdata

In more recent versions of Sage 50, you are now advised to use UNC  (universal naming convention) file paths

\\servername\share name\siliconbullet\Sage Data\Company000\accdata

By changing the way the data is referred to in the COMPANY file (give us a call if you need help in doing this – the file can be saved in different places depending on the operating system you use) the SData Settings in Sage 50 could then find my data, so that ACT could then connect to it.

Sage 50 SData Settings

If you are in Sage 50 2012 you can find out what sort of file path your data is using by going to Help >About and in the Program details area the data directory will be displayed in one of the two ways listed above.

To find out more about the options for linking your two pieces of software then please get in touch.