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The Sage 100 Common Information module can be easy to overlook, but it contains many useful features in one place. Learn how to access consolidated maintenance menus, miscellaneous item history and clean up item history with this helpful Sage software Tips and Tricks video by SWK SVP of STAT, Merilyn Van Zwieten:
Common Information Sage 100 Video Transcript:
Welcome to SWK’s video series on Sage 100. This video is going to discuss the Common Information module in Sage 100. It’s a module that is easy to ignore because it’s up at the top of the list its right under Library Master and it’s not something that you would go into very often.
We are going to discuss each of the menu items starting with the main menu. You’ll notice here that we have Bank Code Maintenance, Miscellaneous Item Maintenance, and Memo Manager.
All of these things are found in other places in Sage, but this is a nice place to find them quickly in case you don’t remember which modules have say, Bank Code Maintenance. Remember you could find that in Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Bank Reconciliation. Miscellaneous Item Maintenance you could find in Accounts Receivable, Sales Order and Purchase Order.
The Memo Manager you’re going to see in most modules and I don’t know if you’ve taken time to look at what the Memo Manager is all about, but it allows you to assign a certain attributes by role of how memos work for an individual that is assigned to the role.
For example, we have check maintenance – well there’s memos in there and anyone with the role of “default” is going to be able to maintain, but I could limit that to be a show or that I would hide it and then the user would not be able to access that check maintenance memos. Also, the auto-display features, we could turn those off for certain users.
If we come here into Sales Tax Account Maintenance, this is where you may have multiple tax codes and you would like them to go to different places in your General Ledger. If you recall under Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable in division maintenance there is only one account that’s the default.
Fortunately, we can override them by a tax code and the only place that you could do that is Common Information. reason codes – these are for codes to assign when you inactivate a custom or a vendor. they both use a common table, but as you can see you have many choices to add as long of a list as you want, to understand why you have deactivated a customer or a vendor. may be helpful for reporting or looking to see out why you are no longer doing business with a particular company.
Moving on to the reports, there’s three reports here, one of them is the Miscellaneous Item Maintenance is kind of a big clunky report, as you can see you have a lot of options of what you’re going to include but I go to preview, I find that there’s just too much information on here, oftentimes to make this particularly useful for me. But of course, you can use the designer to take away the information that isn’t are important to you.
That Miscellaneous Items listing is actually found anywhere you can do the Miscellaneous Item Maintenance. At the bottom of the panel is a little printer icon that will launch this report
Here’s another report on Miscellaneous Items that I think it’s easy to overlook, but can be helpful, this is going to show you, by trend, a lot of information that is based on Miscellaneous Items. Also, on your asterisk items, so if you’re using asterisk items over and over you’ll be able to have a little bit of insight just automatically without having to create your own report and you’re going to get some trending information as you can see from here you have a lot of things that you can choose to sort this that might make this a more useful report for you.
We also have the Miscellaneous Item Detail Transaction report. This you can on a run by period, or by date, make your selections and also your years, and you could choose which types of items you’re going to include. My charge, my miscellaneous, my special – I’m going to leave them all on for now.
Let’s take a look at this. My history isn’t very large, so my report is quite small, but as you could see it’s showing me all the ins and outs, if you will, of the Miscellaneous Items.
This the same type of report that you can have for Inventory Items, but as you know it does not include these types of Miscellaneous Items, so here’s a nice little report if you need to find where you are using perhaps this Miscellaneous code called Cables.
Moving on down to the Setup menu, here’s something that’s important and you may have forgotten about. This is where I define my price quantity and cost and unit of measure conversion, decimal precision. I can go up to four decimals for each item. as you can see, I can mix and match, but this controls how things are going to look in your distribution modules.
You can also see here I have another important feature. By clicking this box, I would expand my Inventory Items from 15 characters to 30 characters. Just a little warning, once you enable this, you can’t undo it. Fortunately, when you try to enable it you do get a little warning that reminds you that you can’t undo it.
Here I have Years to Retain Item History, this is going to impact the reports that you see in the Inventory module.
We have commodity codes, in later versions of Sage in the Inventory Master there is now a field for a commodity code and this is where you can set up your table. There is a nice handy import so if you wanted to import it basically you get some easy instructions here on what you need to do to be able to run this import. Pretty simple, to your import file needs to have two columns, 12 characters for the commodity codes and up to 60 characters for the description. And here is where you would be storing and you could direct it to where you are storing it and then just run the wizard and it will import your commodity codes.
Unit of Measure Conversion Maintenance, we have another video on this feature, but this is where you can set up some standard conversions.
Let’s move to Utilities.
We have a Purge Obsolete Extended Item Descriptions. What happens in Sage as you know that after you have 30 characters on an Item description, it enables another table that stores the extended description. Sometimes when you delete an item, that extended description sitting in that second file doesn’t delete. With this little utility, you will clean up that file so that any orphaned records will be removed.
Purging Item History, this is if I want to, say, in my case, maybe I want to purge my Item history on or before year 2015. Maybe my data files are too big and I want to minimize them, the older date isn’t helpful, I can keep my data files a little cleaner and sometimes when you have reports that you’re running those reports can run a little faster if the files that’s working with is a little smaller.
Recalculate Item History, this is a big one. Every once in while in Sage, we find that the quantities that you see month by month in inventories are incorrect. Running this utility goes back to the transaction files and recalculates all of those quantities. If you have a big dataset this could take a long time to run so you just want to approach this with a bit of caution before running this. Also, try this in a test company first – you may have some results that you are NOT happy with, as is true for all utilities before running them. Please, make a good backup.
We have already talked about the Commodity Code Import.
Take a look at some of these items in Common Information, particularly the Common Information options, make sure that it is set up the way that you need it for your Sage experience.
Hope this helps you get more out of Sage 100. Thank you for watching.
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