If you’re looking to move on from Sage 50, or you’re reviewing whether your current finance system is still right for your business, there’s a good chance Sage 200 and Sage Intacct will both come up in conversation. They’re both Sage products and they can both support growing businesses, but they’re quite different systems. So, how do you know which one is right for you?
The answer really comes down to what your business needs today, where you’re heading and, importantly, what you actually want your finance system to do.
Sage 200 is a familiar choice for many UK businesses that have reached the point where Sage 50 no longer gives them enough control or functionality.
It brings together financials and commercial functionality, with options including sales and purchase order processing, stock management, project accounting and business intelligence.
For businesses that buy, sell and hold physical stock, Sage 200 can be particularly attractive because the commercial and stock functionality sits alongside the financial side of the system.
It’s also a product we know very well at Espi. We’ve worked with Sage 200 businesses for many years, and one thing we’ve learned is that no two installations are quite the same. How the system is configured and how well it matches your processes can make a huge difference to what you get from it.
Sage Intacct takes a different approach. It is a cloud based financial management system, accessed through your web browser, with a strong focus on financial management, reporting, automation and handling more complex business structures.
One of its strengths is the way financial information can be analysed using dimensions. Rather than building everything around a traditional nominal structure, you can analyse transactions by things such as department, location, project or other areas that matter to your business.
This can be particularly useful if you have multiple entities or more complex reporting requirements and find yourself spending far too much time manipulating information outside your finance system.
Neither, and that’s probably the most important point in this article!
This isn’t really about deciding which is the “better” piece of software. It’s about deciding which is better suited to your business.
Sage 200 may make more sense if :
👉 Stock management is an important part of your operation
👉 You have more involved sales and purchasing processes
👉 You want strong financial and commercial functionality together
👉 You already use Sage 200 successfully and it continues to meet your requirements
Sage Intacct may be more appropriate if :
👉 You want a cloud native finance system
👉 You have multiple companies or entities to manage
👉 Financial reporting and analysis are becoming more complex
👉 You need greater visibility across departments, locations or other areas of the business
👉 You want to reduce the amount of financial reporting happening in spreadsheets
There are plenty of other considerations, of course, which is why we wouldn’t recommend choosing a system based on a checklist alone.
This is where the conversation gets particularly interesting.
Traditionally, a growing Sage 50 business may have naturally looked towards Sage 200 as its next step. That can still be absolutely the right move, particularly where stock and commercial processes are important.
Sage Intacct gives businesses another route.
If your main challenges are around financial reporting, multiple entities, visibility or the amount of manual work involved in producing management information, it makes sense to consider Intacct too.
The important thing is not to start with “Which Sage product should we buy?”
Start with “What are we trying to fix?”
This is often the bit people are nervous about.
Changing finance systems does require planning, but it shouldn’t mean somebody turns up on Friday afternoon, switches Sage 50 off and hopes for the best on Monday morning!
A well planned system move normally starts with understanding your current processes and requirements. From there, you can decide how the new system should be configured, what data needs to move, what integrations are required and what your team needs from the new setup.
There will also be testing and training before you go live.
It’s a project, but it should be a controlled one, and we’ll cover exactly what a Sage migration looks like in another blog because there’s quite a lot worth explaining.
If you’re considering Sage 200 or Sage Intacct, our advice is to resist jumping straight into product demonstrations. Have a proper look at what you do now first. What works well? What takes too long? What information is difficult to get? Which spreadsheets have quietly become essential to running the business? What are you likely to need in a few years that you don’t need today? Once you understand those things, comparing Sage 200 and Sage Intacct becomes much easier.
And you don't need to work that out on your own. If you’re wondering whether Sage 200, Sage Intacct or even your existing system is the right answer, have a chat with us. Tell us what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll help you make sense of the options, without assuming that changing software is automatically the answer 😊
📞 01954 213999
