Email a collegue.| Headline: | Sage Line 50 version 12 – Exclusive preview |
| Description: | Sage will be shortly be shipping another upgrade to Line 50. David Carter offers a preview of the new features in the forthcoming version 12
Sage has got into the habit of introducing new versions of Line 50 on a yearly basis. And the upgrades are not just cosmetic either, with version 11 seeing a major enhancement in the form of a new project costing module. Sage recently gave me a demonstration of the new features in version 12. I'll group them into three areas: accounting, stock and sales invoicing, and Excel integration and reporting. Management Dashboards Before starting on the new features, it’s worth remarking on a very interesting idea that Sage is pursuing – management dashboards. Rather than just keep on adding on new features, the company is also aiming to make the best use of the features which Line 50 already has. So it is pulling the data together and summarising it in the form of "management dashboards". For example, one dashboard lists four or five stock items where the stock has gone negative. You then have the option to go from here to display all stock items that are negative or below re-order level. You can then highlight the ones in the list you want to reorder and Line 50 will automatically switch into raising a purchase order for them on the screen – it’s all instant, with no re-keying required. The idea is to use data proactively. Rather than require the user to take the initiative, Line 50 finds the data for you and says: These items are out of line; what do you want me to do about them? This is not a new idea, but it is good to see Sage applying it systematically to Line 50. 1) ACCOUNTING Project costing Project costing was introduced in version 11 of Accountant Plus and Financial Controller. It was a good implementation, but version 12 fills in some gaps. Project and cost codes can now be entered into purchase orders, so it is possible to report on costs committed to a job as well as costs invoiced. You can also now attach project codes to other project codes in the form of a hierarchy. In effect, the lower project becomes a sub-project of the higher one. You might use this to break one job down into individual phases, or to amalgamate all the jobs you are doing for a single customer. Line 50 will automatically "roll up" the lower-level project costs into the higher level. Unfortunately, though, you still can’t correct a faulty project code or cost code in Maintenance. Sage really needs to rectify this ASAP. Bank reconciliation Bank reconciliation in Line 50 has been overhauled. The bank rec screen is divided into two windows. The top one contains the unreconciled items on the bank account, the bottom window starts off blank. After you tick off an item in the top window against the statement, it appears in the bottom window. Effectively, therefore, the transactions in the bottom window come to replicate the statement. You can add adjustments such as bank charges or direct debits on the fly while you are ticking. If you’ve reconciled everything bar one item and it’s 5.30pm, you can save the screen as it is and come back and finish the reconciliation tomorrow. If finally you can’t balance to the statement, you can either ignore the discrepancy and carry it forward to next month, or Sage will auto-generate an adjusting transaction for you. After the reconciliation is complete, Sage generates a copy of the Bank statement in the form of a PDF file so you can’t change it. The PDF looks uncannily like a real statement, although perhaps it would be nice if there were a running balance against each line rather than just a closing balance at the end. You can display a list of all the bank statements going back as far as you like, and display any one in detail as a PDF. This makes audit of the bank account very solid and the Line 50 bank rec now rates as one of the best I’ve seen. If any users are currently having trouble with their bank reconciliations, it would be worth making the upgrade for this alone, I think. Charities For Line 50 users who are charities, Sage have now added a Fund field which allows you to cross-reference any project to a funding source. It is like a Department code, except that it holds a cumulative running total in the balance sheet. Sage tells me that this tallies with statement of recommended practice issued by the Charities Commission. Line 50 also recalculates reclaimable tax for customers who have made Gift Aid donations. Foreign currency Sage now holds a history of exchange rates applying at various dates. When you are revaluing a foreign currency bank account, you can choose to apply one of these rather than just the prevailing exchange rate. 2. INVOICING and STOCK CONTROL Discounts in sales invoicing If you give discounts to customers you can enter discounts into each line of your invoice/order, either as a percentage or as an amount. The screen can also show the total invoice discount as a single amount at the foot of the invoice rather than line by line. Default GL codes in the Customer record If you invoice stock items, the sales invoice is currently analysed in your accounts to the default GL code set up in the product record. The effect of this is simply to reproduce in the P&L the same sales analysis as you already have in your Product Sales Reports. Sage have now added a default GL code to the customer master record. You can choose to update this code to the GL rather than the one on the product record. In effect, you can now analyse sales in the P&L by type of customer as well as by type of product. Quotations History Sage now retains a history of all quotations issued to prospective customers. You can define a quotation as “Lost� to clear it out of the pipeline, but it is still retained until you choose to finally delete it. You can analyse these Lost quotations to see where you are losing sales. And if the prospect finally does come back and give you the business, you can recall the quotation any time and convert it into an order. Reserve Stock ("Put aside") You can reserve a quantity of stock where you know you are going to need it, but the customer hasn’t actually given you the order yet. So you can prevent the stock from being sent off against other orders and make sure it is available when you finally receive the order from the customer. 3. EXCEL INTEGRATION AND REPORTING Excel Functions� You can pull into Excel any field within the Sage database via a Function. These functions (they were in fact introduced in version 11) look remarkably similar to the Excel functions in Exchequer (now IRIS) Enterprise. I’ve seen this feature used quite a lot by Enterprise users. They set up a P&L layout in Excel and call up the balances for each GL account for, say, period 5. When period 6 comes along, all the user has to do is to type 6 instead of 5 in the period box and all the amounts in the P&L are refreshed. It will be interesting to see how successful these functions are with Line 50 users. In Exchequer Enterprise they work well because the database holds a massive array of balances for all periods for all GL codes and all cost centres and all departments in all combinations. I don’t know any other package that holds so many on-line balances. But Line 50 holds period balances for GL accounts only, and none for departments. We’ve had a lot of correspondence on AccountingWEB about producing departmental P&Ls in Line 50, but until Sage put on-line departmental balances for each GL code into Line 50, the data simply isn’t going to be there for these functions to extract. Intelligent Reporting Sage also demonstrated its Business Intelligence module (which after much debate will be called Intelligent Reporting). This is based on the BI package of Intelligent Apps, acquired last year by Sage. The concepts will be familiar to anyone who has used a pivot table in Excel and in fact Intelligent Reporting works within Excel just like a pivot table. The advantage of Intelligent Reporting over pivot tables is that reports are automatically refreshed with the latest data because they run directly from the Line 50 database. In addition, users will be able to take the reports, reformat them and then package them up into a management information pack. Right now, it’s early days with Intelligent Reporting, but when it finally appears, Sage is going to be way ahead of any other entry-level package in terms of reporting capability. To summarise, a lot of serious development is going on up at Newcastle and most of it is good stuff. Sage is clearly out to be the technical leader as well as the market leader in entry-level systems. |
| Date: | 03.09.2005 |
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