Sage are always committed to making their software better for businesses, to help improve the efficiency within your finance department and therefore maintain that edge over your competitors. In this blog we are having a look at some of the promises Sage have delivered, along with their plans for the future for Sage 200.

Sage 200 Standard Recent Changes

August 2023 brought with it a number of improvements to Sage 200 Standard:

1. Webscreen customisation – the Web Amendability model is a low code driven approach to allow the customisation of web screens without the need for developer coding.
2. Continued work on the Sage API, with a variety of endpoints being enhanced or updated.
3. The introduction of 20 spare database fields per entity, including a variety of field types.

There were also a number of updates in February 2023 to Sage 200 Standard:

1. The ability to import vatable journals into Sage 200 Standard, simplifying the import capabilities. This was actually something customers were asking for!
2. The addition of being able to change or add a warehouse associated with multiple stock records, allowing for quick changes to be made.
3. Increasing the length of the part number on the stock record.
4. Supplier alerts – the ability to set notifications on your suppliers that allow reminders and actions to be taken when processing purchase orders and returns.
5. Changes to how the allocation of items are handled, improving reporting accuracy. You can set the allocation date to either the system date or the date of receipt/payment.
6. API updates including: customer delivery addresses, nominal value period to include year end adjustments, transaction enquiries to include financial year start date, transaction enquiries to include accounting period ID.
7. Update for multiple services including bank feeds, invoice payments (Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless), salary and supplier payments.
8. Increasing the number of analysis codes on the ledger from 5 to 20.
9. Increasing the length of the part number and description within the stock module, to aid those migrating to Sage 200 Standard from Sage 50.
10. The addition of runtime reports for bank reconciliations, VAT and year end.

Sage 200 Professional Recent Changes

August 2023 saw the release of lots of update for Sage 200 Professional:

1. Web screen customisation – the Web Amendability model like within Sage 200 Standard, but also full customisation is now available in Sage 200 Professional. This allows users to customise existing web screens, add new web screens and add new fields to the Sage 200 API.
2. Sage 200 Professional via the Sage Partner Cloud Program was deployed onto Windows 11.
3. There was continued development of the API – again, endpoints were updated or enhanced.
4. Like with Sage 200 Standard, the quantity of spare fields was increased from 12 to 20 per entity.
5. Developer Tooling was licenced controlled from this release.

The February 2023 update also brought lots of improvements for Sage 200 Professional, including all of the improvements as above with Sage 200 Standard as well as:

• Prior Year Journals ability to print details, mirroring the functionality of journal entries.
• The removal of support for the following platforms: Win 8.1, Server 2016, SQL 2016

Planned Improvements For Sage 200

The following improvements are due to be released soon for Sage 200 Standard:
– Web screens relating to Purchase Orders, with the ability to create new, amend and view.
– Building out the API to cater for areas delivered via the web form development.
– Fixes for a number of defects as reported by customers.
– Updates to the following items: migration tool, reports designer, payments & banking components, Carbon (used for web screens).
– Changes to banking & payment services that are required to prevent further interruptions to services.
– Changes to the URLS used for Opayo for existing customers.
– Ongoing work to perform maintenance on Sage’s Azure infrastructure for Sage 200 Standard.

The following improvements are due to be released soon for Sage 200 Professional:
– The same web screens improvement as with Sage 200 Standard.
– Purchase order list with the addition of new columns to include received, invoiced, cancelled and disputed.
– Building out the API to cater for areas delivered via the web form development.
– Provide a model architecture for Sage 200 for use with ‘On Premise’ installer for Microsoft Azure.
– The same defect resolution, maintenance of line, and connected services improvements that are happening within Sage 200 Standard.
– The removal of SQL 2017 support with this release.

Looking Into The Future

There are some incredibly exciting improvements on the horizon for both Sage 200 Standard and Sage 200 Professional, so let’s have a look at those in further detail.

• New user types to allow flexibility within your business: Full User, Read Only and CRM roles.
• Further development of the Power BI dashboard including aged debtors.
• Improving the Power Apps to help transform your business.
• Power Automate – building out-of-the-box flows to automate your processes.
• Broadening the invoice payments functionality to help you get paid faster.
• The ability to stop sales order transactions when an account is on hold.
• Purchase order on hold status that doesn’t prevent an order from being processed.
• The ability to completely write off incomplete sales orders.
• The ability to create a virtual return and allocate this to a debit note to impact the invoice value initiated by a customer.
• A stock in transit process that holds stock in a movement warehouse until it has arrived as the desired location with the correct documentation.
• Produce acknowledgements for sales returns.
• The ability to receive stock into different locations / bins from the individual order lines.
• A setting to allow the ability to default the VAT code to be used on a purchase order, to match that specified on the supplier record.
• The ability to hide/remove bins or empty locations.

So as you can see, there certainly have been lots of improvements to Sage 200 this year, and with lots more in the pipeline too. If you would like to find out more about how Sage 200 can help improve your business, get in touch with the Sage experts at Reality Solutions today.

*This article contains general information in order to assist all of our customers and is meant for guidance only – there are no guarantees that the information we provide will be suitable for your particular needs. If you require specific assistance, we recommend that you seek professional guidance on your individual circumstances. Reality Solutions are in no way responsible for any loss or damage arising from any information contained within our articles.