Faces Of Pinnacle | Meet The Sage 200 Support Team | Andy Thomas

This month we are chatting to our Sage 200 support consultant Andy Thomas about life in Pinnacle. Andy has been working within the Sage industry for 14 years and at Pinnacle for 4. Andy works from our Newcastle office.

1. Tell us about your background?

   I have been involved with Sage for nearly 14 years, starting with Sage UK supporting Sage 50 and then moving into the Sage 200 side of things. I started doing support in the dark days prior to being able to remote into people’s machines to actually see what was going on!
   
   After leaving Sage UK I worked at another business partner covering both hardware and software which has given me a rather varied skill set but understanding both does come in rather useful at times.

2. Give us an overview of your typical week at Pinnacle?
   
   My role involves resolving support issues that appear on our support desk but I often get involved with calls of a more technical nature due to my mixed skill set of both hardware and Sage.
   As we have a large customer base this means I am exposed to lots of different environments so I enjoy the challenge of figuring out what has caused the Sage issue and resolving it.

3. What is the most memorable support query you have encountered over the years?
   
   My most memorable call was when I was back at Sage in the days of the floppy disc. I had a customer convinced Sage 50 was eating all of her floppy discs that she was using for backups.
   
   I explained that this couldn’t be the case as Sage simply writes to them, but she was insistent! Fortunately, the customer’s IT colleague was passing her desk and overheard the call, intercepted and explained the drive had been taken out of her PC a week prior as it was broken, the customer had just been sliding the discs into the hole were the disc drive had been!

4. What is your favourite feature within Sage 200?
   
   I like the integration Sage has done with Windows Active Directory the most.

5. What do you like most about working for Pinnacle?
   
   I really enjoy working for Pinnacle, you feel supported to just get on with your job and supported in the decisions you have to make. Also the Christmas parties are really good, at least the bits I can remember!

6. After a long day, what do you enjoy doing to unwind outside of work?
   
   I enjoy going to the gym and binge watching box sets. I’ve also just signed up for Kynren (http://elevenarches.org/) volunteering on the show technical team which will take up rather a large amount of my free time over the summer.

7. What is the one thing about you that might surprise people?
   
   I’m actually a qualified mechanic.