How will I know when I need to move from Sage 50 to Sage 200?

What is the difference between Sage 50 and Sage 200?

As a Sage Business Partner, our Sage consultants are asked these important questions many times, especially by clients that already have Sage 50. If you are considering moving from Sage 50, for any reason, you should include the Sage 200 platform in your decision-making process.

Let us consider the second of these two questions first: –

How will I know when I need to move from Sage 50 to Sage 200?

It seems an easy answer, but you will just “know”.

You may have started to see issues with the performance of your Sage 50 system, your data may have become corrupted because of these performance problems and you may have had your data fixed by Sage on a number of occasions.

Your business model or activities and procedures may have recently changed (especially with the onset of the Covid Pandemic) and you now require better and more robust remote-working abilities.

Your customers may use your website to enter orders and you need these sales orders to automatically integrate into your order processing system. You may have seen a large increase in web orders recently and your current system can’t cope.

Accurate and detailed stock levels may be important to you, especially if you need to keep stock in multiple warehouses and track serial and batch numbers of the products that you have sold.

You might need a more disciplined financials system, especially around period ends. Have you experienced the usual “I have closed down the month and ran all my management reports but someone has posted some transactions into the closed period and now I have to re-run all my management reports again” situation? Don’t worry, you are not alone!

Running reports may have become a slow task, especially if you have lots of transactions. You now need a quicker database to handle these quantities of transactions and to be able to produce detailed reports quickly.

What about Business Intelligence? Do you need to see important business data in easy to access dashboards and charts and graphs?

You might need to move to a better system but don’t want to purchase a new server, perhaps you have made the decision to move to the “cloud” and perhaps even want to move onto a monthly subscription way of paying for a new system.

As you can see, there could be many reasons to move from Sage 50. If you are experiencing one or many of the above issues, it is time to consider migrating to Sage 200.

What is the difference between Sage 50 and Sage 200?

There are many differences, but you can take a lot of comfort in knowing that Sage 200 has the same “look and feel” as Sage 50 and your users will quickly become familiar with the screens, menu layout and reports. Indeed, Sage 200 uses the same report designer as your Sage 50 system. 

An important aspect of moving systems is the transfer of your current data. As you might expect, your Sage 50 data can be migrated into the Sage 200 system quite easily. However, this is sometimes not the best solution and you might need to consider some of the points below:-

What is the state of your Sage 50 data?

✓ Does it need cleansing?

✓  Are you missing key data such as the customer email address or supplier bank details?

✓  Should you consider changing your stock product codes and structure?

✓  Does your current Nominal Ledger give you the business analysis that you need?

✓  Are you content with your customer and supplier account numbers?

✓  Do you really want five or six years of historical data to be carried forward into the new system?

In our experience, sometimes it is better to start with a clean system rather than migrate your current data across. Consider moving to a new system as a perfect opportunity to “re-set” your data and how you perform your business procedures into the future. The old saying “rubbish in – rubbish out” is a true statement.

A detailed look at some of the key differences: –

An important difference in Sage 200, is the fact that the Nominal Ledger can be a 3-tier structure by using Cost Centres and Departments. This is perfect for running Trial Balance, Profit & Loss and other key financial reports by branch, office, geographical location, internal department, sales department and more.

Advanced Stock Control. Sage 200 will give you accurate stock levels by using Allocated Stock, Free Stock and Stock on Purchase Order. This aspect as well as multiple stock locations and bin numbers means that at any given point, especially when you are entering a Sales Order, you know what stock you have available to sell and where it is.

Batch Number and Serial Number traceability. Track where you purchased a stock item from and who you sold it to and when. Do you need to keep “use by or sell by dates” and other key attributes with your serial or batch numbered items.

Stock Costing Methods. Choose which product groups are costed in a specific way. Some of your product groups can be based on Average Cost, others could be based on First In First Out rules, others can be based on cost prices per batch or serial number. This feature is crucial in providing accurate valuation of stock reports and sales profitability analysis.

Sage 200 uses Microsoft SQL as its database engine. This industry standard database solution means that huge numbers of transactions can be entered and the ability to run reports on your data will be much quicker than you will experience in Sage 50.

Project / Job Costing. This fully functioned job costing system integrates with most of the other modules in Sage 200 and will allow you to enter timesheets (that can be linked to Sage payroll), remotely entered expenses, committed cost analysis, staged sales billing and invoicing, cost and revenue budget analysis and comprehensive reports and screen enquiries. Issue and return stock to and from projects easily and set user permission levels and filters.

MRP. Although Sage 50 does have a Bill of Materials system, Sage 200 goes to the next step and you can purchase a module that will provide Works Order Processing and Materials and Resource Planning.

Multi-Company Consolidation in multi-currency. Set up multiple companies in Sage 200 and connect your subsidiary companies to group or holding companies. Produce financial reports on your subsidiary companies and well as a set of consolidated financial reports for the entire group.

Sage 200 allows you to run set of pre-defined Excel pivot-table type reports from your Sage 200 data directly into Excel.

Set up foreign currencies for Bank, Sales and Purchase Ledger accounts and use foreign currency revaluation procedures.

Sage 200 offers a structured and disciplined approach to period and year ends. If a period is closed, you cannot post back into that period unless it is re-opened. Define which users can close and re-open certain modules.

Role based permission settings for Sage 200 users.

Unlimited numbers of users where Sage 50 has a maximum of 20 users.

Integrate Sage 200 with the Sage CRM system and see your leads and sales opportunities as well as create Quotes and Orders in CRM and integrate them with Sage 200. Enable your CRM users to see key financial data about your customers without having to have access to Sage 200.

These are just a few of the key differences, see the full list here.

In summary, you could struggle with your Sage 50 system past its usefulness for your organisation and, in our experience, continue to struggle unnecessarily when they could take the relatively easy option of migrating to Sage 200 and resolve many of the issues that could be holding your business back.

Join our Sage consultants here at Qmulus Solutions for remote meeting and a coffee and tell us what issues your business has with Sage 50 and how moving to Sage 200 will provide a better solution.

 We really want to help you to take the next step correctly and easily and, ultimately, provide a commercially successful implementation of Sage 200 into your business.



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