Sage 200

Today I was invited to an overview of Sage 200 by Ian Mowbray of Sage, hosted by Datel at their Warrington offices.  Whilst I have all the technical information I need about the product c/o Sage, I had never seen it in action.  In simplistic terms, Sage 200 is Sage 50’s big brother.  The product adopts a similar look and feel to Sage 50 and includes, as far as I could see, all the latest features added to Sage 50 in its 2010 guise.  Sage 200 is aimed at growing SME’s who demand that little bit more from their business software and delivers improved performance and scalability simply because it uses Microsoft’s SQL Server as its RDBMS.  Once you start looking closer at the software, there are clearly many improvements over Sage 50 and additional modular features can be added catering for a wide range of business operations including Manufacturing, Wholesale and Retail, Construction etc.   

Strangely though, CRM is provided as a separate web-based application, although it is tightly integrated (probably using a web service) with the main application. This means that some users would have to log into two separate applications to get a full view of the business.

The migration path from Sage 50 to 200 will be smooth for those familiar with V12 onwards and data can easily be migrated to minimise implementation costs and aid historical reporting.

A second break-out session covered Management Reporting.  Well we’ve all been there and built Excel Spreadsheets to summarise complex data into meaningful management information and perhaps written VB macros to get the information at the click of a button etc. etc.. Well, no more.  I saw a tool that extracted Sage 200, 500, and 1000 data into an OLAP cube and ran virtually instantaneously every report you need to effectively manage your business.  The product comes as standard with hundreds of reports and is available on an annual subscription….the name, well you’ll have to contact me if you’re interested!

Rather than to discuss the key features here, I have added an Introduction to Sage 200 Brochure to the resources page of this web site for readers to review at their leisure.

Anybody who wishes to see the product at first hand will have the opportunity to do so at a relaxed informative event planned for the 18^th November 2009 in Bolton – details to be posted shortly.