What is Sage 200 Financials?

The Sage 200 Suite helps organisations with a typical turnover of £1m - £20m to coordinate their whole business: from financial and customer relationship management, through to back-office processes such as stock control and core activities such as retail/wholesale, construction, manufacturing, engineering and on-line trading. You can share data easily throughout your business and tailor it to your organisations requirements.

To build your perfect Sage 200 system you can add as many, or as few, modules as you require. Each module adds a different set of functionality to the system and all modules seamlessly integrate with one another for a complete solution.

The extensive reporting suite and business management information allows you to access your data any way you want to and gives you the information you need to manage your business effectively.

Features

Nominal Ledger
Cash Book
Purchase Ledger
Sales Ledger
Business Intelligence
CRM

Nominal Ledger

• Flexible nominal account structure including departments and cost centres
• Budget control, assign annual budgets and create customer budget profiles
• Group accounts to summarise the balance of many nominal accounts
• Batch journal entry and templates to apportion fixed amounts or apportion across cost centres
• Support for open or closed period accounting with up to 20 periods
• Graphical analysis and presentation of nominal data
• Nominal ledger drill-down
• Online VAT return submission via a link to HMRC
• Automate pre-payment and accruals
• Flexible P&L and balance sheet design and reporting
• Consolidate nominal ledger data from two or more separate companies and using different currencies
• Associate transactions with an analysis code to report across codes, cost centres and departments
• Foreign currency reporting

Cash Book

• Hold accounts in any currency
• Use bar charts and graphs to show balances in order to view the liquidity of all your accounts
• Process foreign currency transactions accounting for exchange differences and bank charges
• E-Banking facility allows supplier payments to be made through your banking software
• Bank Reconciliation routine allows you to quickly reconcile payments and receipts entered with bank statements
• Automate standing orders and direct debits and get an instant detailed view of when and how often they are paid and number still to pay
• Inter account transfers allow you to move money between bank accounts for the same or different currencies
• Group transactions in Cash Book and drill down to view individual postings

Purchase Ledger

• View bar charts and line graphs to show turnover and aged balances and compare with previous years
• Define analysis codes to categorise suppliers and analyse transactions
• Use trading periods for the nominal ledger to match accounting period structure or your own data range
• Drill down and analyse supplier transaction details from one screen
• View the status and details of any account, invoice or purchase order from the supplier record or transaction enquiry and drill down to line detail
• Authorisation of purchase invoices
• Batch data entry to allow changes to batched transactions before committing to the ledger
• Advanced currency handling so you can see the difference in aged credit due to changes in exchange rates
• Creditor revaluation option
• Factor house facility to link suppliers to a factor house who recovers payment on their behalf
• Automated payments routine to assist in cash flow management and speed up payment processing
• Multiple trader contacts – for greater contact visibility
• Credit reference information for suppliers to allow you to monitor and report on supplier status

Sales Ledger

• Triangulated goods on the EC Sales List to support goods on the EC Sales List
• User defined analysis codes
• Advanced currency handling
• Credit reference information to enable customer credit rating, account terms and payment terms to be stored against a customer record
• Trading periods can be set to match the accounting period structure or your own date range structure
• Multiple trader contacts to store unlimited contact information for improved visibility
• Graphical analysis and presentation of sales ledger data allows quick comparison with previous years
• Head Office Statement facility allows you to say who should receive the statement
• Transaction and account drill down and around facility from one screen
• Integrated credit management features to manage and automate your credit control processes and improve bad debt and cash flow
• Bad debt provision and write off facility
• Batch Data Entry to allow quick processing of batches of transactions

Business Intelligence

Sage 200 BI is a powerful tool developed by Sage to create useful management reports, with graphics using your Sage 200 data and the familiar platform of Microsoft Excel.

Extract meaningful timely intelligence from your data without having to learn complicated field names. Business Intelligence comes with a catalogue of pre-defined reports, e.g. Sales by customer by month, worst paying customers, most profitable products. These reports can be customised to your requirements or you can generate new reports that were previously too complicated to produce.

• Reporting and Analytics within Excel

  Analyse your data quickly and effectively in a familiar environment. Sage 200 BI brings data into Microsoft Excel without the user needing to export or rekey the information, allowing you to enhance the reports using standard excel formatting, such as calculations and macros. This functionality minimises the training required as the majority of users will already know how to use Excel.

• Drill Down

  From each report in Sage 200 BI you can drill down through increasing levels of detail. For example, if you are looking at an overview for the current year you can drill down into a particular month and then at a daily level.

• Identify historical trends

  Pinpoint areas of inefficiency

• 360° view of your business

  See a 360° view of your business from sales and marketing figures, to stock and suppliers

• Quickly identify and investigate anomalies

• Produce professional, presentation-standard reports and dashboards

• Time saving

  Save time by eliminating the manual exporting and copying and rekeying of data

• Reliable Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services

  SQL Server Analysis Services is a market leading OLAP technology. Therefore, Sage 200 BI is built on a reliable and robust platform.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software provides sales, marketing, and support teams with powerful tools to efficiently and effectively manage customer relationships.

Helping you to connect all the different parts of your company, an integrated CRM solution can ensure that everyone, in every department and business area, works together to deliver outstanding customer service.
Going way beyond simply contact management, CRM now comprises not only sales, marketing, and service automation; it also provides a platform for winning, keeping, and developing customers. Such has been the change in perception that CRM is now often referred to as customer experience management, or CEM.
Sage 200 customers already have an integrated CRM module as standard. Easily configured to the way you work, you can quickly have a solution that will help you to deliver excellent customer service, manage your contacts and sales activities, and create effective marketing campaigns.

Features:

One view of your customers

We have included CRM within Sage 200 in response to the need to share information across the entire organisation. Using the CRM functionality will help you to simply and easily integrate front and back office functionality, and share vital customer information across your entire company.
Front line staff will have easy access to financial and transactional data not normally held in CRM. Back office staff will be able to easily call up details of what is going on with prospects and customers when dealing with service issues, for example.

A central source of information

As the number of ways your customers can interact with you increases they expect to get excellent service at every point of interaction. This means that everyone in your business needs to know what’s going on – from marketing, sales and service, to production, shipping and accounts.
Integrating CRM with your operational systems creates a single view for everyone, from logistics to sales and service. This ensures consistency of service whoever initially deals with the customer. It also improves financial visibility, as you can share financial information with front office staff in total security, while only letting them see what they need, and what you want them to see.

Seamless end-to-end processing

As well as sharing information, with Sage 200 you can create seamless, straight through processing. This means that, for example, quotations can be generated from within CRM by sales people, based on accurate and up to the minute pricing details pulled from your ERP modules, sales people can make promises to customers that they know they can keep.
A tightly integrated solution also means that quotations can be turned directly into orders, without the need for rekeying.
This kind of straight through processing can also help speed up the resolution of customer issues as queries can be routed via powerful workflow capabilities to the appropriate personnel. This means that it is no longer necessary for individuals to chase up queries to ensure the customer has been dealt with, increasing the speed and accuracy of case resolution.

Delivering excellent service

With an integrated CRM solution it becomes possible to focus on the service you offer companywide. Service level agreements (SLAs) and best practice can be shared with everyone via customer profiles that go beyond sales and marketing.
Rather than having to rely on sending memos between departments and hoping that they will be followed up, you can automatically inform service and operations of the needs of each and every customer, based on what you know about them from every interaction.
With an integrated CRM solution you can ensure that whoever a customer talks to, their concerns, questions, or requirements can easily be communicated to the relevant person or department. So if, for example, a customer responds to a marketing email by saying they are unhappy, this information can be passed seamlessly and quickly to the service team to deal with, enabling you to proactively get back to the customer before they have even logged a complaint. And that’s the kind of service that will keep customers coming back.

Eliminating islands of information

If you, in common with many companies, use multiple systems to manage sales, marketing and customer service you may be storing up problems for the future. While each solution might work well for each group, it may not be delivering the best companywide solution. By creating islands of information you could be hindering productivity, increasing costs and limiting visibility about what is going on in your business.
By integrating CRM horizontally across your customer facing operations, and vertically with your back office operations, you will eliminate the problems and challenges that separate systems can create.

Enhancing companywide productivity and profitability

By giving everyone a complete view of the customer every individual in your business can quickly assess all the relevant information about each customer when any issue or opportunity arises.
People can communicate more effectively with each other to resolve issues, and they can alert others to the status of customers. Access to this readily available information increases productivity. Integrating your sales and marketing with your help desk lets people see if customers have outstanding issues, potentially avoiding the embarrassment of trying to sell to customers that are currently unhappy with your company. But equally, as soon as an issue is resolved, your people can resume their activities in an account.
It has been consistently shown that it costs considerably less to do business with existing customers than it does to find new ones, and repeat customers typically spend as much as 70% more with suppliers than new ones do. In addition unhappy customers typically tell around 10 others about their negative experience, and with so many people now talking on social media such as Twitter, news, both good and bad, can travel faster and further than ever.
An integrated CRM can help you to drive loyalty through the delivery of excellent service to your existing customers, reducing your cost of sale and increasing your revenues.

Bringing everything together

Ensuring that customer data is shared around your organisation and that processes run from one end of your business to the other can help you to adapt to what customers want.
Ultimately an integrated CRM solution can help you to coordinate your business internally and via the multiple channels through which your customers can now interact with you.
Sage 200’s integrated CRM will ensure that you not only put your customers at the centre of your business it will make sure that you can offer consistent end-to-end customer management.
It makes sure that everyone knows the role they have to play and has easy access to the information they need, wherever and whoever they are.

Next steps……

For further information on how Sage 200 Financials could work for your business please contact our customer service team on 01954 213999