That is where simple reporting tools, like Microsoft Office Excel, can become such an asset to your daily business processes. 

Did you know that by leveraging Microsoft Office Excel, you can manipulate your reporting data from your Sage MAS ERP solution so that you can:

• Reduce the file size of an Excel document even after a PivotTable has been included?
• Separate an Excel column of mixed positive and negative figures into two different columns?
• Insert a chart without going through the Chart wizard?
• Automatically insert a frequently used list of items into a worksheet?
• Display numbers in one or several columns as only thousands or millions?
• Automate the comparison of two lists to identify the differences between the two?
• Easily print different ranges in the same spreadsheet for different departments?
• Match the name of a worksheet tab to a cell on the worksheet?
• Sort a month column in month order?
• Customize your Excel user experience?

Learn how to accomplish all of this and so much more by downloading the “Simplify your Sage Reporting Process: Excel Tips and Tricks Booklet” here. 

If your reporting needs extend beyond the functionality available in Excel, Sage MAS 90 and 200 and Sage MAS 500 contain several tools to enhance your data reporting and analysis, including the powerful new tool, Sage MAS Intelligence. 

What is ACH?

ACH is an acronym that stands for Automated Clearing House. The ACH network is a secure payment transfer system that connects banks all over the U.S., making it easy for them to transfer funds amongst one another while relying on a common set of standards. It represents an important link in the Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) process that acts as a sort of escrow for payments as they await clearance for their financial banking destination. 

The new ACH feature in Accounts Payable allows you to use EFT as an alternative to issuing paper checks for payment.  That means paying vendors and taking advantage of early payment discounts is easier and faster than ever.  Plus, you eliminate the complications and cost of:

• Processing paper checks including printing, stuffing, and mailing
• Purchasing and securing paper check stock
• Approvals and signatures that can delay paper processing

Since ACH is governed by strict rules that regulate electronic payments, you can rest assured that your electronic banking transactions are totally secure.  The new ACH feature supports both the United States (NACHA) and Canadian (AFT) formats.

What is Positive Pay?

If you’re unfamiliar with Positive Pay, it’s essentially a tool for fraud prevention and security.  Offered by most banks, Positive Pay is a service that matches the check number, account number, and dollar amount of each check presented for payment against a list of checks that have been previously authorized by your company.  All three components of the check must match the exact details of the authorized list or the bank will not pay.

With Positive Pay in Sage MAS 500 Version 7.3, a file is generated and sent to the bank each day that checks are written.  That file contains information necessary for the bank to match your authorized payments. In the event that a check is presented that does not match the list, the bank will send an image of the item to you for manual authorization to pay or return the check.

See ACH and Positive Pay in Action – View a Quick Demo

If you want to reshape that box of software to create a custom fit, then you should consider the Sage MAS 500 Customizer module.  It allows you to modify screens, forms, toolbar buttons, terminology, and add or remove data entry fields so your Sage MAS 500 installation fits you like a glove.

Do I have to be a Technical Wizard to Use It?

The short answer is … it depends.  What does it depend on?  The level of complexity of the modifications you’d like to make. Most cosmetic changes can be made without extensive programming knowledge.  It’s relatively easy to re-order the tab sequence, change screen text and colors, and deactivate fields you rarely use. 

But if you want to kick it up a notch and really give your Sage MAS 500 system an extreme makeover, Customizer is flexible enough to significantly alter the application interface, add new screens and fields, and really get your hands dirty with Microsoft VBScript and source code.

Improve Workflow and Efficiency

Customizations can be created for each user or group of users based on the way THEY use the system.  Does your order entry staff have to tab through a bunch of fields they never use?  Get rid of those fields with Customizer and clean up their screen.  Want to create an interface to another system used in your company?  Customizer has you covered.  Any way you slice it, you’ll improve productivity, streamline workflow, and reduce data entry time because Customizer makes Sage MAS 500 work the way you do … not the other way around. 

And from a security and maintenance standpoint, customizations are stored on your MAS 500 server, not on individual workstations.  That makes it easy to manage all customizations from a single location as well as roll those customizations forward when you upgrade to a new version.

Break out of the box with the Sage MAS 500 Customizer module. 

Download the spec sheet for more information on Customizer features and reports.

Sage is on pace to release MAS 500 version 7.4 in the second quarter of this year.  This next release promises enhancements to the product along five different themes.

Productivity Enhancements – These improvements will enhance the way that users track the overpayment of invoices, process customer refunds, support negative line items on both sales orders and purchase orders, and process Automated Clearing House (ACH) extensions.

Manufacturing and Distribution – These enhancements will allow users to change preferred vendors for replenishment, use the transaction date as post date for manufacturing transactions, and complete work orders without issuing material.  They will also improve landed cost, enable progress reversals, as well as provide a backflushing setup hours option of always, once, or never.

Unit of Measure – Improve the accuracy of your units of measure conversions and begin reporting in alternate units of measure with these updates.

Financial Reporting – Sage has committed to support FRx through December 2012 and will maintain backward compatibility with FRx in version 7.4. The biggest addition to the MAS 500 financial reporting tools will be the release of Business Insights Intelligence, which will serve as an alternative to FRx (in addition to MAS Intelligence).  Business Insights Intelligence will make complex reporting easy in the familiar Microsoft Excel interface, providing advanced financial reporting functionality with quick access to business critical data.

Platform and Performance – These enhancements will enable MAS 500 to leverage and work in conjunction with Crystal 2008 (v12), Microsoft Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.x.  They will also include improvements to the Business Insights Explorer performance, updates to third-party controls, and Operating System and SQL Server Service Packs.

Beyond these new features and feature enhancements in version 7.4, Sage also plans to release a Product Update within four months of the version release to address any bugs that need fixed and provide additional enhancements.

A scheduling tool also gives visibility to sales and customer service as to the status of a customer order or potential manufacturing backlogs.

The MAS 500 scheduling module is highlighted by the following features:

• A graphical schedule board allows lets you drag and drop and operations either backward or forward. You can also lock an operation to prevent it from being moved by other users or schedule regeneration.
• What-if simulations can be used by using multiple schedule versions. You could have a different schedule for each different manufacturing facility and a master schedule that encompasses all facilities. Shop conditions can be analyzed by different schedule versions. For example: 
  • What if we work the next 6 Saturdays?  How will that affect our completion times and customer promise dates? 
  • What if we take Drill Press #1 down for 2 days of maintenance?
• The schedule is flexible enough to allow for:
  • Work center and machine availability can vary day by day
  • Forward scheduling from start dates or backward scheduling from required dates
• From the schedule board you can quickly find any work order. From there you can drill into the work order to see data such as:
  • Operation start dates and estimated completion dates
  • Work center utilization reports and graphs
  • Standard versus actual quantity produced
• By integrating the schedule with MRP, as the schedule dates change and work orders are moved on the schedule board, MRP can now see the new requirement dates for raw materials to allow for more informed purchasing decisions.

The Scheduling module in MAS 500 is a tool that assists with the manufacturing process. Besides planning and scheduling production it has enough flexibility to address real world problems like machine breakdowns, material shortages and resource issues.

Download the Scheduling Fact Sheet to learn more!

By Jeff Steel, an Ohio Sage MAS 90, 200 and 500 consultant

Here are the main entry screens that allow for intercompany transactions:

1. General Journal transactions (GL)
2. Recurring journal transactions (GL)
3. Allocation entries and transactions (GL)
4. Process Vouchers (AP)
5. Recurring Vouchers (AP)
6. Enter Purchase Order (PO)

All of these entry screens open up a company ID drop down on the lines screen of the transaction.

An intercompany transaction in Accounts Payable may look like this:

An invoice is entered in AP for $1500. The invoice is for an advertising expense. You want the amount distributed so $500 posts as an expense in company code SOA while $1000 posts as an expense in company Code COA.

The following tables show how MAS 500 would book this voucher.

Entry posted in Source (Company SOA)

Entry posted in Target (Company COA)

When looking at this entry, you may ask where it picked up the due to and due from accounts. These are defined in the General Ledger in maintain target companies.

The main function of Maintain Target Companies is as follows:

• Defines the target companies the source company can post to. There is no limit to the number of target companies.
• Identifies the GL accounts (due to, due from) for the different types of transactions. Eg.. vouchers, GL journal transactions and GL allocations. You do not have to have the same chart of account between source and target companies.
• Maintain Target Companies must be completed first before intercompany transactions can take place.

By Jeff Steel, a Sage software consultant in Ohio

1. Contract Pricing (Item) – This is where per customer and warehouse you define what a customer will pay for an individual item.
2. Contract Pricing (Product Price Group) – This is where per customer and warehouse you define what a customer will pay for a product price group. A product price group is assigned to an item. An item may have only one product price group.
3. Inventory Pricing (Customer Price Group) – This is where per item and warehouse you define the customer price group. A customer price group is assigned to a customer. A customer may have only one customer price group.
4. Inventory Pricing (Standalone) – This is where per item and warehouse you define the price for an inventory item.
5. Matrix Pricing by Customer Price Group (or by Product Price group) – Once the product price groups and customer price groups are established, this is where you can enter specific price information for a product price group and/or customer price group combination.
6. Product Price Group – If no matrix pricing is established, pricing options can be established when building the product price groups.
7. Customer Price Basis – On the customer record, you can define per customer how to calculate the price of the item. You choose a price base for the customer. The choices are: Average Cost, List Price, Price sheet 1, Price sheet 2, Price sheet 3, Price sheet 4, replacement cost and standard cost. You can also define a percentage to add to the base price for the customer.
8. Standard Price of the Item – If none of the above exists then the standard price of the item is used.

MAS 500 can also establish promotional pricing. Here you can establish a date range for the promotion as well as add items to the promotion. In determining the sale price if a promotion exists, MAS 500 will use the 8-step hierarchy from above and also calculate the promotional price and will return to the sales order the lower of the two prices.

When establishing pricing in the difference variations, MAS 500 gives us the ability to establish an effective date and expiration date. Besides different methods for calculating the price (Eg..Discount %, Discount Amt., Markup %, Markup amt.), MAS 500 also lets us define quantity break pricing if needed.

The different pricing features of MAS 500 allow flexibility to match your current pricing model. The key is defining how your pricing model works now. In most cases, once defined, MAS 500 has been able to fit the needs of pricing products to customers. 

By Ohio Sage MAS 500 Consultant, Jeff Steel

The main features of the cash management module automate the bank reconciliation process in the following ways:

1. Many banks now provide an electronic file of cleared checks. MAS 500 can import these electronic bank files of cleared transactions to save time in your reconciliation process.
2. If bank transactions are missed or only appear on the statement, you can enter any bank transaction, such as bank fees, interest, or adjustments, on the fly while reconciling your account. This saves time instead of going to a separate data entry screen for recording adjustments.

In addition to these bank reconciliation functions, the cash management module also includes the following functionality:

During the setup of the module you can define an unlimited number of user-defined transaction types with a default offset account for quick processing of bank transactions. An example of these could be: Bank Charges, Bank Interest Earned, Transfer to and Transfer From.

You can also define your own tender types for cash, checks, credit cards, money orders, drafts, or coupons.

Most of the deposits to bank accounts are handled through the Accounts Receivable module. You can choose to automatically create the deposits when processing a cash receipt in Accounts Receivable or you can have the system manually post the deposits, where the user has the choice of reviewing or combining the deposit batch with another manual deposit.

Cash Management in MAS 500 also supports integration with the multi-currency module. Therefore you can:

• Set up bank accounts and enter transactions in currency other than the home currency
• Create multi-currency deposits
• Transfer cash from bank accounts with different currencies
• Override exchange rates to modify the settlement amount

The Cash Management module in MAS 500 can simplify deposit generation and reconcile transactions. With the Business Insights Explorer tool you can quickly analyze cash transactions and see history or detailed account statements. This module is designed for any transactions that affect the bank account giving you one central module for looking at bank activity.

While Crystal Reports and Business Insights Explorer/Reporter are still available to you, Sage has created Sage MAS Intelligence, powered by Alchemex, to give you valuable insight into your business data and operations, allowing you to make more effective decisions.  Sage MAS Intelligence will be available to MAS 90 and MAS 200 users in August and MAS 500 users shortly there-after.  Leveraging Microsoft Office Excel, Sage MAS Intelligence enables you to create real-time automated reports with up-to-date and accurate information.

Sage MAS Intelligence has several tools to make your reporting and business intelligence customized to your unique business needs, including:

If you own FRx, you will automatically receive Sage MAS Intelligence Report Manager licenses when it becomes available.  Additional Report Manager licenses, Report Viewer, Connector, and Report Designer licenses will need to be purchased separately. 

Contact Socius to learn more or for help integrating Sage MAS Intelligence into your Sage MAS ERP software solution. 

Sample Dashboard:

Sample Report:

Earlier this year, Sage announced that it would no longer be releasing the monthly updates to the MAS 500 ERP product.  Instead, they are now releasing a product update once every 3-4 months.  Less frequent updates mean less time upgrading and more time using the system to better manage your business data and processes.

These product updates not only include resolutions to known issues, but also enhancements to MAS 500’s features.  To learn about what enhancements are in store for future MAS 500 product updates, download the Sage MAS 500 Roadmap.

The Q4 2010 update will be focused on Business Insights and Intelligence and will help FRx users bridge the reporting gap that is being created by the discontinuation of the FRx solution.