When your business grows it’s important to keep on top of your accounting and make running your business as easy as possible. Your accounting software is key to that, but although the popular Sage 50 is an excellent piece of accounting software, it can become quite limited.
The good news is that the upgrade to Sage 200 Extra is a natural migration and progression for Sage 50 customers who have outgrown the software.
Sage 200 offers you a lot more of everything: For example, Sage 50 can handle up to 1.5 million transactions whereas Sage 200 Extra is technically unlimited, having sites with over 9 million nominal transactions, 300,000 orders, 750,000 stock codes, or 15,000 projects.
There are also lots of extra tools and options that come with Sage 200 Extra. So let’s take a look at what they are:
1. Helpful and handy Add-ons
Sage 200 Extra comes full of tools that you can use straight away to help you run your business smartly and efficiently. Sage 200 Extra is modular, in other words you choose the elements you need when you need them and add others as your business develops. For example the CRM integration allows you to view the Sage 200 data in real time.
2. On the go and in the cloud
Sage 200 Extra can either be installed in your premises or accessed via the cloud. What does this mean? You will be able to access your accounts on the move on multiple devices, making it much more flexible. If your business wishes to reduce ongoing costs, such as server hardware, IT maintenance costs for server configuration, disaster recovery and backups – Sage 200 Online does all this for you.
3. Accurate and up to the minute finances
You can be even more precise with your business finances. Track budgets, drill down into data and deal with all your VAT submissions. Sage 200 offers suggested payments in the purchase ledger, multiple contacts on customer and supplier accounts and another level of analysis using the transaction analysis codes.
With interactive dashboards for sales, purchases, sales orders and financials, this can give you an even greater view of the health of your business.
You can also gain greater control over your accounting periods, with up to 20 accounting periods, which can be open, closed and re-opened as needed. Then you can control the length of period and set up period structures in advance for future years.
Setting up cost centres and departments as well as profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow reporting with the option to group accounts for reporting purposes are all very useful features. As well as being able to make adjustments to previous year journals and roll changes forward to ensure your accounts are accurate and up to date.
4. Business intelligence
Sage 200 comes with its Business Intelligence module, a tool that helps you identify key trends and patterns and gives you greater control over your business. You can effectively analyse critical business information for agile decision-making and improved visibility across your organisation with powerful analytical tools.
5. Better reporting
It’s important to have the right tools and functions to hand, to make finding and interpreting information about your business easy. Sage 200 Extra now uses Excel™ to offer a customisable reporting tool that allows you to take data and filter, format and formulate within the familiar environment of Excel.
6. Commercials & managing stock
Sage 200 Extra is designed to help you manage every element of your supply chain with a sophisticated stock management system that’s linked to your financial data. This will allow you to manage your stock from multiple locations, and from multiple bins within the locations, giving you full control of your inventory in multiple warehouses or on the road.
Sage 200 Extra also allows full serial and batch traceability, which enables the management of stock by ‘sell by,’ ‘use by,’ and stock group. Up to 20 analysis codes can be allocated to stock transactions so that you can monitor all movements and trace back the order for product recalls. You can get a complete inventory and warehouse management solution to help you optimise stock levels, keep costs down and deliver what your customers want.
7. Manage your sales orders
From raising a quotation or order to checking stock, delivering goods and raising invoices, Sage 200 Extra gives you complete control of your entire sales order process. When you enter a sales order for an item that’s not normally held in stock, it can automatically raise a purchase order to the item’s supplier. Or you may choose to use stock that’s on-hand first, making sure you efficiently manage and control your stock. Automatically produce all the documents you need including order acknowledgements, picking lists, delivery notes and invoices as part of the sales process. Deliver items to a number of delivery addresses, including your premises, customers and suppliers.
8. Managing your manufacturing and production processes.
With the Bill of Materials and Manufacturing modules this provides you with the flexibility to choose what’s right for your business, whether you have light or more complex manufacturing requirements. Unlimited components, operations and assembly levels on the bills of materials give you greater flexibility in matching the software to what you actually do. The manufacturing planning module recommends what to make and buy to meet your customers’ needs, ensuring the stock is on hand when it’s needed and the finished goods are ready when they.The graphical planner can produce a finite capacity plan so that you know the resources will be available when they are needed.
9. Making the switch from Sage 50 is simple
Fortunately, making the switch to Sage 200 from Sage 50 is straight forward. Using Sage’s migration tool, we can convert all your Sage 50 data to Sage 200 Extra in no time at all.Alternatively, you may wish to take the opportunity to review your current data and start with a clean sheet in Sage 200 to take advantage of the many features in the software.
This post was written by Alan Becker of the Price Bailey Business Systems & Software team, who are a specialist Sage 200 Business Partner and experts in business accounting software solutions.
