Sage 50 2009 updated with new credit control features
The annual upgrade to Sage 50 started arriving on users' desks last week, featuring new features to help small companies cope with the tightening economy. John Stokdyk reports.
Sage is hardly a retiring violet when it comes to publicity, but with the economy looking bleak the company appears to have taken a very low key approach for the latest release, which it has enhanced with features designed to help companies with cash collection.
On opening up the new version, there is a new display option on the Customers and Suppliers screens to show a Dashboard view of the main numbers relating to orders and payments.
There is also a new Cash flow module that shows a summary of outstanding and recurring payments and to provide an instant cashflow forecast. Users can select the accounts they want to include in any forecast and export the results as an Excel file, or email a view to colleagues via email.
Sage 50 2009 includes a new Diary module to help automate credit control activities. The Diary looks like a cut down version of the Outlook Calendar and can link into Microsoft's program. The Sage version lets you create tasks and To Do lists. The tasks can be linked to specific customer or supplier contact details and promised payments entered into the Diary will feed through to cash flow forecasts when you refresh them.
Aside from these cash-focused improvements, Sage has enhanced other areas such as VAT, invoicing, error correction and multicurrency. It has also introduced a retrospective reconciliation feature into the bank rec routine. If you need a budgeting application Sage 50 2009 lets you create a chart of accounts specifically for budgeting, with the ability to edit the structure so you only budget against those accounts that you want to track.
The new facilities are described in more detail on our sister site AccountingWEB.co.uk which concludes that while Sage 50 2009 is hardly the most exciting accounting application in the market, it is a major player and many of the new additions will be welcomed by users.
But with each annual release, Sage 50 becomes increasingly complex. As the company often notes from its own market research, most small companies are looking for accounting applications that will make life their easier.
In a thread on UK Business Forums, most of the participants have yet to load the new version on to their computers, except for Sheelagh, a bookkeeper who installed it so she could support a client using Sage 50 2008. "I am fully expecting some bugs so we will be continuing to use 2007 as much as possible."
Sheelagh is indeed likely to face minor glitches, as the 2009 edition has a slightly different data structure, so the files need to go through a conversion routine.
Another member, garyk, suggested that Sage 2010 is going to be bigger news when the company ditches its "archaic proprietary file data storage" and moves to the mySQL database.
"Still think if they are not careful looking at a proper SaaS version of 50 they will get hurt by the online boys over time," he added.
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BusinessZONE - 5-Sep-2008
Categories: News, Technology
Story read: 2200
