Sage 100 Visual Integrator turn recurring data movement into a process.

Visual Integrator—usually shortened to VI—is Sage 100's tool for defining controlled import and export jobs between Sage and outside data sources.

Sage documents support for traditional data files as well as ODBC-compliant sources. A VI job can do more than match one incoming column to one Sage field: it can apply validation, selection criteria, skip rules, conditional values, user-defined fields, and run-time assignments as part of the job.

That is where VI becomes interesting. The real job is not simply moving data. It is translating the source into something Sage 100 can use consistently.

• Customer, vendor, item, invoice, order, and transaction imports
• Recurring exports from Sage 100 to outside systems
• ODBC-connected import and export jobs
• Field mapping and data translation
• Conditional assignments and specialized validation
• Selection and skip-record criteria
• User-defined field participation
• Testing and preview of incoming data
• Scheduled Visual Integrator jobs
• Chained jobs where one import depends on another
• Scripts and subroutines around job events
• Troubleshooting inherited or undocumented VI jobs

ODBC and Visual Integrator often appear in the same project, but they do different jobs. ODBC provides a standard way for compatible applications to connect to data sources. Visual Integrator provides the Sage-oriented job around that connection.

Sage documents the ability for VI to link multiple ODBC tables, select fields for an import, generate the associated SQL statement, and allow advanced users to edit that SQL.

Then VI adds the things that matter when data is headed into an ERP system: mapping, validation, conditional logic, testing, selection rules, scheduling, sequencing, and repeatability.

Sage documents multiple ways to run Visual Integrator jobs: manually, through Windows scheduling, from an external program or script, or on a recurring cycle within VI itself.

Jobs can also run in sequence. Sage gives the example of importing customers first and invoices immediately afterward—a small detail that illustrates a much larger point: business data often has dependencies.

VI can also run additional commands, scripts, or functions before a job, after success, or after failure. That lets the import or export become one part of a broader automated process.

Not every Visual Integrator project starts from a clean whiteboard. Sometimes the job already exists. It has been running quietly for years, the source system changed, and now records are failing or values are landing somewhere they should not.

We can work backward through the source, mappings, validations, criteria, ODBC connection, scheduling, logs, and downstream Sage behavior to understand what the job was designed to do and what changed.

A job that worked once is not the same thing as a dependable integration. We want the process understood well enough that the next change is diagnosable.

• What Visual Integrator Actually Does in Sage 100 →
• Using ODBC and Visual Integrator With Sage 100 →
• Sage 100 ODBC & Data Access Consulting →
• Sage 100 Integrations & Connected Systems →