Omega Results has one major philosophy – to give its clients the opportunity to save time and money.
To this end we have deliberately chosen software to make life easier and more rewarding for the people who use it.
Accounting software from Sage, whilst the most popular in the UK, is not always the most user‐friendly, depending on the company’s needs.
We at Omega have created a large number of additional reports and found workarounds to get the best out of Sage 50, Payroll and Batch Controller.
One difficult area is with Sage 50′s departmental analysis. Unfortunately there is something of a problem where some areas use the Department Number and some use the Department Reference. This caused no end of problems until the problems were all identified. Our client had a number of department codes it has used for years, these were set up in Sage 50 and we expected these to be used consistently.
Here are details of what needs to be used:
1. Importing Transactions – asks for Department Reference – actually needs Department Number.
2. Balance Sheet Accounts – all one department – control accounts pick up entry from input P&L item – may need to be changed for consistency.
3. Bank Revaluation – Drop‐down box shows Department Reference – need to put in Department Code.
4. All control accounts use default of 0 – need to be changed for sales, purchases, discounts, exchange differences etc.
5. None of the standard reports give Department Reference – need to be added from linked table.
6. No departmental TB and dumping all transactions from the ledger into CSV is not reliable.
7. (Spurious duplicates appear that are hard to find) – needs to be exported by ODBC and exclude deleted transactions. These transactions can then be used to create a Trial Balance for all balances by account code plus department.
The other area where we needed to put in extra work was in the payroll to nominal link – it didn’t work because the company wished to split its direct, indirect and salaries into different nominal codes and the payroll doesn’t allow for this.
The company also has bonus schemes and shift allowances and overtime rates for Saturdays, Sundays and nights, too much analysis for Sage Payroll to handle! We modified the reports to suit and created a spreadsheet with 4 linked worksheets to create the journal from CSV dumps of the reports automatically. The journal can also be imported if required, to create the CSV reports and the journal we timed at 4 minutes. Without these Excel models, the time taken and errors caused would be quite significant.
The company also produces for their Management Accounts detailed departmental reports and reports for their bank and investors. Nineteen schedules in all – this package usually took three days to produce from the trial balance – with the power of Excel that is reduced to 10 minutes. Details of how to do this can be found on: Automating The Management Accounts Process.
We’d love to hear about your experiences with Sage 50 and what excites you as well as what annoys you.
If you’ve moved from Sage 50 what was that experience like and what did you move to?