Jim McGlen, the New Head of TAS, Sweeps in With a New Broom

Last week I received from TAS their e-contact email headed up by an editorial from Jim McGlen, the new head of TAS who has taken over from Matt Forrest. Jim invited users to contact him with feedback so I welcomed Jim onboard, wished him luck and invited him to read this user group's postings to which I have contributed many times. 

As a passing shot I mentioned my current irritations which I have posted in this group before.  In summary the first one concerned not being able to import TAS Basic v8 into TAS Books for Accountants. Many attempts had been made to resolve this by my client with the help of TAS support but to no avail. I got involved and was told by support that it categorically couldn't be done - so we gave up. A shame as the client only upgraded from the free version 7 for my benefit.

As a workaround I asked TAS to upgrade my client to First Books using the points available under the accountant's club reward scheme. I was told the rewards could only be used for new clients and not for upgrading existing clients. A check on the TAS web site shows this restriction is not mentioned at all when publicising the reward scheme.

After the weekend I received an email back from Jim expressing his concerns. He has obviously looked into the issues I raised and told me expect some phone calls which I did, today.  

Jim has confirmed that the reward scheme may be used to upgrade existing clients and the web site will be rewritten shortly to reflect this. As a consequence the account managers have been updated so I have today arranged for a reward scheme copy of First Books to be sent to my client.

Support have now interrogated my client's data and found the error which they have corrected. I have also mentioned a few other general niggles as the chap appeared to be genuinely very interested.

This is huge turnaround for TAS considering we users have been banging on getting nowehere for ages. My problems have been resolved very quickly thanks to Jims intervention. Having spoken to staff over the phone today I sensed a passion returning; an eagerness to put things right.  I urge any user with irritating problems who cannot seem to make any headway through the usual channels to contact Jim on jim.mcglen@tassoftware.co.uk. They are asking for feeback so, if they're willing to listen, this is a chance to feed back and possibly make TAS products great again.

Jim, I hope you don't run out of steam like your predecessors. Thanks again for your help.

Stephen Quay