So Many Screens, So Little Time – Tips to Simplify and Streamline Sage MAS 500 Navigation

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Julie Stankey

Due to the number of screens and fields in your Sage MAS 500 system it is often challenging to find the data you are looking for when navigating through the system.

However, you can increase the efficiency of navigating by:

Creating menu based shortcuts using “My tasks”
Customizing the navigator or lookup to easily find data
Utilizing the right-click mouse button to drill around the system

My Tasks

Many times, when you are trying to find a certain task within MAS 500, the standard task menu can be overwhelming. To make things easier, find the MAS 500 task you are preparing to launch and add it to “My Tasks” as shown in the image.

The goal is to get a short list of maybe the 10-20 tasks you use frequently in MAS 500.

The Navigator and Lookup

The Navigator and lookup icons provide a search window that will help you find the data you are looking for.

Remember the following to when working in the lookup windows:

You can add/remove/move columns in the lookup grid.
Once you make your changes, be sure to save settings which will make this customization available in the future.
Move filtered data to excel.

Drill Around

One of the many features of MAS 500 is to be able to drill around while in any screen in MAS 500. This is done by right clicking on any field on the screen that references some master record.

I can find or drill into the following data on the inventory item on a sales order:

Stock status of the item
Recent sales
Pricing
Item or inventory maintenance
much more

From the same sales order, I can find or drill to the following data on the customer:

Open quotes
Open invoices
Last activity
customer maintenance
much more

These are just a few examples of right-clicking on any field in the MAS 500 system. The drill around feature allows you to see what the function of that field is before you take any action. Therefore, “when in doubt, right click” becomes crucial to any new users of MAS 500. However, using the power of the right click helps makes navigating MAS 500 more efficient for all users.

By Jeff Steel, an Ohio Sage ERP consultant