PeachFuzz

Everyone wants their software to perform faster, right? Working with a specific application, however, and getting it to run faster on a network can be as much art as science. Here are five general tips for what you can do to improve the performance of Peachtree on your system if you are encountering poor performance. Some of these things are easy to do and can be handled by users, and some should be “tweaked” carefully and left for your “IT Specialist” to diddle with.

1.  Tweak your anti-virus settings – Most anti-virus software allows you to define “exclusions” to virus checking. You should “exclude” the folder where you installed Peachtree on your local drive, as well as the folder and all subfolders on the server where your Peachtree data is stored. This will not likely put your computer in harm’s way; we have not heard of any malicious software ever infecting a Peachtree .DAT file.
2. Free up local hard drive space – You should try to make sure that you have three times the size of your largest company database or 1 Gb, whichever is greater, available as free space on your local hard drive. If Peachtree needs to create a Windows “swap” file, this is where it will be parked. Running a “disk defrag” on the local drive to optimize the available storage space can also help in some situations.
3. Edit your Peachtree global settings – There is a section on the “General” tab under the Global Settings menu that allows you to set up “smart data entry” rules. While enabling these settings can be handy and make the system more convenient to use, they can also contribute negatively to performance. Unchecking all of the checkboxes in this area may improve speed.
4. Disable Events- This is an area of Peachtree that we find hardly anyone uses, but it may still be “activated” on your system. To turn this off (which can improve performance) click on Tasks, then Action Items, then click on the “Options” button on the Action Items menu bar. From the Options menu select the Transactions tab, and uncheck any of the boxes that are checked off in the “Create Event” column.
5. Avoid duplicate transaction reference numbers – Peachtree allows you to use the same “reference number” (e.g., vendor invoice #, cash receipt ID, etc.) as long as you do not use it for the same “master record” (vendor, customer, etc.). However, using the same number over and over (e.g., “cash” for all deposits) causes the application to work harder when searching and storing information. Keeping all of your “reference numbers” unique to the greatest extent possible can improve performance. It can also make life much more pleasant in the unhappy event that you ever need to export and re-import your data; the import will sometimes reject duplicate reference numbers.

 Of course the most significant contributor to system performance is the size of your Peachtree database, and within that database the single biggest contributor is the Journal Row (JRNLROW.DAT) table within the database. This table holds ALL of your Peachtree transactions, and each time you search for a transaction record the system needs to read through that entire table to find the requested record.

 So, how big can this file safely grow to before performance becomes an issue? There is no hard and fast rule for this (still more art than science), but our general “rule of thumb” is to begin thinking about maintenance to your database when the journal row table approaches 150,000 total records, if you are using any version of Peachtree except Quantum. The more powerful Quantum product can gracefully accommodate three to four times that number of records without causing significant performance “degradation”.

 You can review the record count for all of your Peachtree tables by selecting Help | Customer Support and Service | File Statistics from the top menu bar within Peachtree.

 Once you have determined the overall size of your Peachtree database and viewed the record counts for the individual tables, you can make a judgment about purging some data. Purging is the process of physically removing selected records from the system, to shrink the overall size of the database. It can, however,  be a time consuming and technically daunting task, since there are any number of “gotchas” that can impede or abort the purge process.

We have assembled a set of instructions for performing Peachtree database purges on our website, which you can review by clicking here. In some circumstances it is more cost-effective to use an outside data repair service to fully purge records that are no longer needed in the system. And in all cases, it is good practice to make an “archive” copy of the database before starting a purge. Peachtree Premium makes the archiving process easy, but Peachtree Complete users can create “manual” database archives.

 Carefully following these “best practices” for Peachtree data storage will help you to get maximum performance from your Peachtree software.

Special Upgrade Pricing Offered

We are pleased to announce that TriStar Data Systems is now a “Platinum-level” Certified Consultant for Peachtree (and Timeslips, too!)

This status gives us greater visibility in the Peachtree and Timeslips user communities, better access to product support and management at Sage Software, and allows us to better serve our Peachtree and Timeslips customers.

In celebration of this newly achieved status, we are offering a special discount of 5% below the lowest quoted price from Sage for Peachtree 2010 and Timeslips 2010 upgrade licenses, through June 30, 2009. For customers already receiving upgrade discounts via your TriStar Support Plan, this discount will be applied on top of your normal software discount.

If you have had any inclination to upgrade your existing system, you will never find a better price than what we are able to offer right now, as a result of our Platinum status. To qualify for this special discount, you must place your software order through TriStar, and all orders must be received by close of business on Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

Peachtree 2010 was released to customers about May 19, 2009. Here is a quick rundown on the five most interesting new features of this edition of the product. 

Automated Backup – Peachtree will now include a routine to automatically back up your Peachtree database at a user-defined time of day, and it will make this backup for you automatically without any user intervention. It will not be necessary for Peachtree to even be running when the backup process starts. As a Quantum only feature, Peachtree will automatically log out any users who are still connected to the database when the scheduled backup begins. 

Customer Management Center – Expanding on the “Business Alerts” concept, Peachtree 2010 will offer an additional “dashboard”, focused on customer details. From this configurable interface users will be able to quickly retrieve comprehensive information on their customers, including open quotes, unpaid invoices, orders to ship, aged balances, open time tickets, specific inventory items purchased over some defined time period, and various other key business indicators relating to customer management. 

Inventory Management – With the release of the product users will be able to look up inventory items based on searches for key words in the various “memo” sized fields (Description for Sales, Description for Purchases, and Item Notes. This feature could lead to some very creative uses of these description fields for classifying and categorizing items. A new report has been added which shows item sales history by customer, to help spot trends in customer purchasing behavior. Inventory item type can now store a “default” value, rather than the previous “hard coded” default of Stock Item, which should lead to fewer item maintenance errors when entering new items. 

Record Transaction History – This feature allows the user to quickly see the entire “chain of events” related to a specific transaction, moving either forward or backward in the sales or purchasing process. Thus the vendor payment screen will offer a fast and easy method for viewing the underlying purchase order(s) which initiated this payment, without having to first pull up the vendor invoice and from there open the purchase order. The same functionality will be available for customer quotes, orders, invoices, and payments. 

Multiple Companies/Improved Security – Users will now be able to open multiple Peachtree databases at once, without having to close one to open another. In addition, security has been strengthened by adding additional security options (“strong” passwords, lockout after multiple failed access attempts, password expiration, user access to change their own passwords, etc.) 

The Quantum version of Peachtree 2010 offers some additional interesting features available only to Quantum users.

 Order Processing Workflow – You will now be able to “model” your company’s order processing workflow right in the software. Each step in the order process can be identified and annotated with detailed notes, and completion of a step in the process can send an automatic notification to the next person in the processing chain. A centralized “status” screen can also be configured to show all of the steps required for a specific order or orders, with notes, next steps, and scheduled tasks displayed.

 “My Personal Dashboard” – Users can create their own personal “dashboards”, with multiple “views” for different types of information recorded on the dashboard. These dashboards can provide a very visual indicator of business performance, and can allow managers to quickly pull together various accounting components into a comprehensive snapshot of the company. Track open quotes, orders to be filled, and customer open invoices on one tab, and inventory production runs, items below minimum quantities, and open purchase orders on a separate tab.

 Multi-User Management Tools – Need to make a backup, or run some database maintenance, but find that others are still logged in? In Peachtree Quantum 2010 you will be able to “broadcast” a message to all logged in users to alert them to log out, or if necessary you can manually log out other users yourself to complete that critical task that requires exclusive access, without having to chase down individual users.

 We expect the Peachtree “Sneak Preview” webinar on April 21 to show some or all of these new features, and we will be attending comprehensive training classes on Peachtree 2010 from May 11 to 14 in Nashville. Once we return from that trip we will have lots more to say about the new Peachtree 2010 product!

Sage Software is sponsoring a “sneak preview” webinar of the new Peachtree version that is slated for release in mid-May. The webinar will be held on Tuesday April 21 at 1 PM, and advance sign-up is required.

A lot of improvements in this new Peachtree version are focused on Sales Order entry and inventory, including a very interesting new “workflow manager” for sales order processing (in Peachtree Quantum only, I believe).

If you would like to learn more about how you can capture your own internal “workflow processes” within your accounting software, you should plan to attend this one hour seminar. Some of the software engineers who created the product should be on hand to answer questions at the end of the webinar.

Send me an email at jmschaller@tristardatasystems.com if you would like to register for this informative one-hour presentation.

“Auto Complete” was a feature introduced into Peachtree a few versions ago to make data entry more efficient and less error-prone. When entering data into a screen, some fields really do need to be “validated” to insure that everyone is entering the text consistently (essential for report filters and data sorts to work correctly).

However, typing an entry into one of these “drop down” fields will add that entry to the drop down list automatically if it is not an entry already on the list. Most of the time this is what you want to do, but sometimes data gets into these fields that is clearly incorrect and doesn’t belong there. Problem is, once it’s on the list anybody can select it on a subsequent record entry and compound the error.

So, how do you get rid of these unwanted entries?

Cleaning this up is a two-step process, First, find all of the records that have the incorrect entry and edit all of those records to replace the field(s) with the correct entry; this can be done manually, or via a mass export/import (call us if you don’t know how to do this).

Next, once you are sure that no records are holding the values you want to remove, run a Peachtree Data Verification (File | Data Verification). Choose the option to run both tests, and choose to make a backup before running the tests (always back up before running any database maintenance task).

Under the Hood: The Data Verification process checks the values in the AFLOCAT.DAT table against all the values in all the records, and removes any values that are unused (e.g, mis-typed, mis-”cased”, etc.).

Once complete, those unwanted, unneeded choices will no longer appear in your drop-down lists.

Peachtree offers a significant amount of customization capability for the reports and forms generated by the product.  Sometimes in our rush to make  modifications to existing reports, to suit our specific needs, we neglect to think through an organizational structure for managing these changes, resulting in what we term “Turbo Chaos”.

Here are a few tips for managing your modifications to Peachtree reports and forms:

1. As soon as you begin to make changes to a standard report, change the report title from the “standard” title to something more descriptive of the specific objective you are trying to achieve (e.g., Bookkeeper’s A/R Reconciliation”). With each revision to the report, save it as a “new” version, with the version number in the title, until you have it exactly as you originally envisioned the report. Then – and only then – delete all the “earlier” versions, and change the report title to reflect what you want to appear each time you run it.

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2. When modifying Peachtree forms, include the date of the revision in the name of the form (e.g., TriStar AP Check 021508). Again, track versions with each “save” until you get the form the way you want it, then delete all the versions except the one you want to use. Retain the date in the form name so that you will be able to easily track when it was originally designed.

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3. Peachtree organizes the Reports Menu, by default, with all “custom” reports listed first within a report group, followed by all “standard” reports. Within these two groups individual reports are sorted in standard “computer sort” order, which is to say numbers (treated as text) first, followed by letters. Thus 1 and 10 come before 2, and all three come before “a”. So, if you have a desired order for your custom reports on the menu, apply a little creativity to the naming convention, using a combination of numbers and letters to achieve the desired result.

As spring approaches,  “Peachtree Upgrade Season” is upon us. For the past few years Sage Software has released a new version of Peachtree every May or June. This year (2009) Peachtree will begin shipping its Peachtree 2010 product line on or about May 15.

Why should I bother to upgrade, my software runs just fine?  We offer two responses to clients who offer this all-too-familiar refrain.

First, Sage Software’s support policies provide end-user technical support for the “current” version of Peachtree and the prior two releases. Thus with the release of Peachtree 2010, Sage will shortly discontinue product support for any versions of Peachtree older than the 2008 edition. There are obvious revenue generation motivations for Sage to follow this course, but it also speaks to the difficulty of maintaining a support organization with expertise in many different product editions.  Software telephone support is not a long-term career choice for most aspiring technologists, so these positions inevitably turn over pretty rapidly. Chances are, after three years there are very few support technicians at Sage who have been exposed to a version of Peachtree that is more than three years old.  TriStar’s staff does not turn over, so we support any version of Peachtree in use, but our options are similarly limited if we need to turn to the “manufacturer” for product support on your behalf.

Second, Peachtree users who process payroll within Peachtree absolutely need to remain on a supported version of the product. When payroll tax tables change, payroll tax forms change, or more significantly, when payroll tax policy changes (forcing a change in the actual processing instructions) Sage will only make those changes to the product editions presently supported.  With health care reform, economic stimulus efforts, and a myriad of other “sea changes” emanating from Washington, it is very likely that “older” versions of the Peachtree software will not be capable of processing these changes.

So, the practical implications of this policy is that you need to upgrade your system no less frequently than every three years.  With the “life cycle” of computer hardware now acknowledged to be less than three years, there are often “technological imperatives” for upgrading your accounting software. Applications released more than three years ago (and likely designed well before that) are unlikely to behave flawlessly in a new operating system, on new computer hardware, that didn’t exist when the accounting application was originally designed.

Love it or hate it, responsible business owners should expect to upgrade their “business critical” software applications (of which accounting is certainly one) no less frequently than every three years.

So, how old is your accounting software?

This blog is being created and maintained by TriStar Data Systems, a consulting firm based in Blue Bell, PA that has  supported accounting software  since 1989. As “Peachtree Certified Consultants” (which means we pass an exam administered by Sage Software on the Peachtree product annually), we provide training, support, and technical assistance services to about 300 Peachtree users in the PA-NJ-DE area.

Our intent in creating this blog is to maintain an efficient vehicle for passing along tidbits, timely tips, alerts, and generally sharing  our accumulated knowledge about the Peachtree product, especially as new versions and features are announced.

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