If you’ve been using Sage 200 for a few years, there’s a good chance the way your business works today looks rather different from when the system was first set up.
You may have more people, different processes, new reporting requirements or a much larger volume of transactions. And somewhere along the way, a few spreadsheets and manual workarounds may have appeared because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need new software. Sometimes it simply means it’s time to take another look at the Sage 200 system you already have.
This is usually a good place to start.
If somebody is regularly taking information out of Sage, changing it elsewhere and then putting it back in again, ask why. The same applies to repetitive data entry, manually producing the same reports every month or maintaining spreadsheets alongside Sage because the information is easier to find there.
Sage 200 includes functionality for automating and streamlining business processes, so there may already be a better way.
Sometimes the answer is a change to the way Sage is configured. Sometimes it's additional functionality or an integration. And occasionally we'll look at the process and agree that the spreadsheet is perfectly sensible!
We recently talked about this in our blog on Sage 200 and Excel reporting, because reporting is one of the areas where we often find businesses doing far more manual work than they need to.
Sage 200 includes Excel Reporting and Business Intelligence options, as well as standard reports throughout the system. There are also options for creating more visual reporting using Microsoft Power BI.
If your month end involves several hours of exporting, copying, pasting and checking, show us what you're producing. There may be a quicker way of getting there.
Businesses rarely stand still, and stock is a good example.
Perhaps you now have several warehouses when you originally had one. Maybe you need better batch or serial number traceability, more complicated pricing or tighter control over purchasing and stock availability.
Sage 200 Professional supports functionality including multiple stock locations, warehouse management and batch and serial traceability. You can see the differences between products in Sage's Sage 200 product comparison.
If you're manufacturing too, there are additional options available through CIM200 Manufacturing, which works with Sage 200 Professional.
Our own Sage 200 Modules page is also a useful place to see some of the functionality you can add around your core Sage system.
This one isn't particularly glamorous, but it matters.
People join, leave and change jobs. Someone who needed access to something three years ago may not need it now, while another person may have taken on additional responsibilities.
It's sensible to review users and permissions periodically, particularly for areas involving financial information, payments and sensitive business data.
This also ties into wider security. The NCSC recommends controlling user access so people only have the permissions they need to do their jobs.
This is probably the easiest one to overlook.
People tend to learn enough to do their job and then get on with it. Over time, shortcuts appear, knowledge gets passed from one person to another and useful functionality can be completely missed.
Sage provides its own learning and training resources, but sometimes the most useful training is specific to how your business actually uses Sage.
That's why our Sage 200 Training can be built around your processes rather than simply taking everybody through a generic list of features.
It's very easy to blame the software when a process becomes frustrating. Sometimes the system genuinely isn't right for what you now need, but sometimes Sage 200 is perfectly capable of doing the job and simply hasn't kept pace with the way your business has changed.
If you're constantly working around Sage rather than with it, have a chat with our Sage 200 Support team. Tell us what's taking too long, what you're doing manually and which bits regularly cause groans around the office.
We may be able to make life considerably easier without changing your accounting system at all 😊
📧 support@espi.net
📞 01954 213999
