Sage 50 Accounts query

antix80

Hi. Looking into whether sage 50 will be suitable for our small office.

Our Office is part of a group. We have to submit a simple record of our income and expenditure to the parent company in excel format on a monthly basis (all on one page), but it needs to identify receipts to and payments from other offices within the group using their abbreviation (e.g. CORK, GALWAY, TIPP). It's nothing to us, but important to them for consolidation. VAT and currency aren't an issue at all.

In Sage, I'd propose setting up the other offices as customers and suppliers using the names in caps above.
When booking internal sales (mainly cash, but occasionally cash against a receivable balance) we'll put in their customer number as reference and book it to internal sales.

Now it comes to exporting from Sage into excel in the agreed format.

(tldr;)Will it be possible to run a single GL export from sage that includes the customer/supplier number?
So the GL export will look like this:
Date_____Type______NomCode Description Amount Supplier/Cust
1/11/19__CashJnl____4000_____External sale____ -€20_____ n/a
2/11/19__CashJnl____4001_____Int cash sale____ -€25_____ CORK
3/11/19__RecJnl_____4001_____Int Sales________ -€10 ___ GALWAY
30/11/19_CashJnl____Bank1 ___________________ €45
30/11/19_RecJnl_____Debtors__________________ €10

antix80

No sage users? After hours of searching i found this..
"Essential fields are lacking, especially code names. So, Sage brings over nominal codes, department codes and customer codes, but no code descriptions. For those without a phenomenal memory, this is irritating."

So, I'm closer to my answer than before. The report will be suitable as i can set my own customer codes.

Can someone confirm that the customer code appears on both the sales invoice gl posting, and the debit to the bank (or credit to receivables... are bank receipts and debtor movements even shown as separate gl lines or are they lumped together as movements requiring viewing the customer journals for the detail)?

DubCount

antix80 wrote: »

No sage users?

Maybe if you want an instance response, you should pay for a consultant?

I find the tracking of Customer Ref's in sage 50 is poor. Have you considered entering the customer Ref into the Reference, Internal Reference, or description field? This might make it easier to track when you download the GL data into Excel. Not ideal, but its a work around that might help.

antix80

DubCount wrote: »

Maybe if you want an instance response, you should pay for a consultant?

My main reason for posting was to add some information..

DubCount wrote: »

I find the tracking of Customer Ref's in sage 50 is poor. Have you considered entering the customer Ref into the Reference, Internal Reference, or description field? This might make it easier to track when you download the GL data into Excel. Not ideal, but its a work around that might help.

I had a look at Quickbooks (all day) today which works pretty well for P&L assuming the person doing the data entry can be careful with certain transactions. But like Sage 50, the complexity now seems to be keeping activities separate at balance sheet level, and with the complications of intercompany transactions however simple they are, it looks like setting up separate companies with a larger accounting package seems to be the safest solution.
Obviously not the one we'll go with because it would be prohibitively expensive.
Best solution seems to be a decent bookkeeping package to replace our spreadsheets, a bit of care initially to make sure everything's working as expected, and yep.. an export to excel.

I found out Quickbooks pulled a fast one in the US. They built up business charging $50 a month, then took heavier users and jacked the price up to $150 a month, even though their desktop product costs $300 for a perpetual licence.

That being said, it's currently €29 a month + Vat for the $50 version (and they haven't introduced the $150 version here yet).. and with their black Friday deal Save 90% for the first 6 months.

nothing

Unless there are a huge amount of transactions, excel itself can probably do the job using a few formulas. You have to enter the data either way, why spend funds unnecessarily?

DubCount

antix80 wrote: »

My main reason for posting was to add some information..

Fair enough, I apologise for my nasty comment.

antix80

nothing wrote: »

Unless there are a huge amount of transactions, excel itself can probably do the job using a few formulas. You have to enter the data either way, why spend funds unnecessarily?

Well the file for consolidation is only one part and excel does that very well. But we need a system like sage and being able to do an export in a suitable format is killing 2 birds with the one stone.

Anyway thanks for the feedback all.

DubCount wrote: »

Fair enough, I apologise for my nasty comment.

Np. Tbh it probably wasn't possible to give a definite yes/no answer to my query. I'll give sage 50 a go when i get a chance. I'd imagine it's quite similar to quickbooks.