Tim Rodman posted on July 26, 2010 13:41
MAS 500 FRx Replacement
FRx was first developed in the 1980’s and has steadily grown into the most popular report writer used in the mid-market. It runs on multiple accounting systems and boasts over 100,000 installations.
Although it has its quirks, FRx has survived longer than most people anticipated due to the fact that it does its job of simple report writing well. However, in recent years, the popular report writer program was acquired by Microsoft. Ever since the acquisition, there has been talk of its retirement. This year Microsoft released the first version of the Management Reporter suite which will eventually replace FRx.
Faced with the retirement of FRx, Sage Software, the publisher of Sage MAS 500, recently unveiled their replacement program. The program is called SMI and the preliminary demos look very promising.
Here are a couple key advantages of SMI over FRx:
- The ability to design reports in Excel, a familiar application environment for most users.
- The ability to connect to any ODBC compliant database. This means that we are no longer limited to reporting on the GL module only. Also, we are no longer limited to only MAS 500 data. We can combine data from multiple systems into one comprehensive report.
Partners are due to receive their copy of SMI towards the end of August. Keep checking back for more updates on this exciting product.