Sage 500 ERP Features

A New Degree Of Excellence
Successful businesses evolve with trends and technology—and rely heavily on their business system to do the same. With a new streamlined distribution workflow, unprecedented access to information and a powerful new Warehouse Automation module, Sage MAS 500 continues its leadership position its latest release. These key features further simplify the ease of use that Sage 500 ERP customers have come to know and expect, while adding functionality that makes you more agile and responsive in today’s fast-paced, service-oriented economy.

Automated Warehouse Management That Makes Sense
The Warehouse Automation module for Sage 500 ERP streamlines order picking and cycle counts for your warehouse personnel, instantly feeding information wirelessly back to your Sage 500 ERP system with proper validation. Your data collection is timelier and more accurate when your warehouse employees are able to record their activities using these handheld devices. Warehouse Automation includes label formats which you can use as they are, or with LabelXpert Designer, you can customize and create new label formats. LabelXpert Designer allows users to customize labels for every purpose such as: item tags, shelf tags, bin tags, and carton tags. LabelXpert Designer supports both laser and thermal label printers. You can purchase the Warehouse Automation and LabelXpert Designer modules together or separately.

Handheld Devices
Use the system’s handheld software on any Windows Mobile device with a wireless connection. The handheld software, written with the latest .NET technology, is hardware independent so you can select the hardware that best meets your individualized business needs. Real-time activity is updated within Sage 500 ERP after each single transaction.

• Streamline wireless order picking with the Automated Warehouse Automation module
• Experience the consistency of getting the same view launched from various locations with the Context Menu Preview feature
• Accomplish more with sales order entry enhancements
• Eliminate the need for manual entry with improved StarShip integration
• Get enhanced expense tracking without loading a dialogue
• Review and approve employee hours and expense with ease
• Accelerate the netting of AP and AR invoices
• Obtain exceptional access to information like never before

Access Points
Access Points are the devices that receive the signals from handhelds. For optimum Wi-Fi coverage of a warehouse, the number of required access points will depend on the size of the warehouse, the material content of the stock or its packaging, and other factors. A certified hardware vendor should perform a site survey for coverage optimization.

Streamlined Distribution Workflow
Sage 500 ERP users will experience a significant increase in productivity through improvements in sales order workflow. A new streamlined grid-based entry provides a more heads-down approach to order processing. Sage 500 ERP allows organizations to tailor the sales order entry interface to match their internal procedures and guidelines using a new built-in customization interface where fields can be added and moved by company, group, user, or site—offering complete flexibility and control. As an extension to sales order processing, Sage Software has fortified the pick, pack, and ship capabilities of Sage 500 ERP with new features such as auto-generating serial numbers and shipments. An improved StarShip interface eliminates the need for warehouse personnel to manually enter package dimensions. These features and many more will provide both distributors and manufacturers the tools they need to increase profits and maximize their most valuable resource—their employees.

Sales Order Entry Enhancements
Streamlined Drop-Ship Processing The entire drop-shipment process within Sales Order is now streamlined. You can select the Purchase-from Vendor in Sales Order Entry and acknowledge and pick drop-ship orders. A new multi-purpose Drop Ship report will provide timely data about your drop shipments.

Gross Profit Display
Sage 500 ERP displays the calculated gross profit for each line on an order, and can warn users when profit dips below your acceptable level. You can elect to use the Average, Last, Standard, Replacement, or Landed Cost as the basis for the calculation.

Order Copy
Sage 500 ERP increases productivity by adding the ability to copy sales orders, allowing you to create a new order by copying from an existing order. You can also re-price the order to ensure you’re charging the customer the proper amounts.

Promotional Pricing
Using promotional pricing will allow you to configure a date-specific promotion by Item, Warehouse, Sales Product Line, Purchase Product Line, Product Price Group, Primary Vendor, and Product Category. Designate either fixed or percentage-based discounts that are established by price or the quantity ordered.

Real-Time Inventory
For busy distributors, batch processing of transfer shipments, customer shipments, and customer returns slows down the order cycle. Sage 500 ERP will remove batch processing from these functions. This will allow you to more quickly and easily enter and update sales transactions resulting in accurate inventory levels throughout the day.

Customized Order Entry
Customize Sales Order Entry screens by user, group, company, or site—choose which fields should be included or excluded from the primary line item grid entry, as well as which fields should be delegated to the miscellaneous tab. Plus, columns within the grid entry can be frozen to help you retain visible context as you scroll from left to right.

Credit Management
Managing customer credit is an important tool for distributors. Sage 500 ERP adds a new optional credit check routine that serves to place orders on credit hold as well as lift credit holds from orders for customers with resolved credit issues. The picking process will also identify orders on hold that cannot be picked.

Streamline Picking
Automatically generate shipments from picking, and skip the picking confirmation and shipment editing tasks by completing edits for lots, serials, and bins from within picking. Manage manual or automated product substitution within picking. Receive notifications of shipcomplete rule violations for items or customers while still in picking. Short picks will be readily identifiable to aid decision-making during the picking process.

Shorten Serial, Bin, and Lot Entry
Simplify your data entry process and reduce the margin for operator error. You now have the ability to enter a range of alphanumeric serial numbers, or to continue using single serial numbers. If you’re looking to expedite repetitive entry against the same bin or lot number, the latest release of Sage 500  ERP retains the values as the default during your work session. Ranged entry also extends to the manufacturing modules in Sage 500 ERP.

Rapid Entry Packaging and Shipment Process
Capture more information faster in Edit Shipments. In moments, you can tally the boxes; the quantity and item descriptions for each box, their tracking numbers, and easily move items between boxes and shipments. The data also serves your packing list and bill of lading printouts.

Improved StarShip Integration
Eliminate the need for warehouse personnel to manually enter package dimensions during Edit Shipments. With the new carton table feature, you can predefine the dimensions of all your standard packing containers such as boxes, cases, and pallets, and the dimensions will automatically feed into StarShip. You can also flag hazardous materials through the entire distribution process, from order processing to StarShip.

Business Insights Explorer Module
Building on the success of the popular Business Insights Analyzer module, Sage 500 ERP has introduced the Business Insights Explorer. As the newest member of the Business Insights suite, Business Insights Explorer takes inquiry, drill down, drill around, and analysis to a whole new level. You’ll immediately reap benefits from its extensive set of usability and customization features.

Preview
With the Preview option, you can view key information about a specific entity such as customer or vendor, plus related transaction header information such as invoices, vouchers, orders, or projects. Filters can also be applied to any view, restricting the data displayed according to user preferences. By selecting a customer, for example, the context of the related view will automatically change to only show the rows that apply to that customer. Sage 500 ERP Business Insights Explorer comes with a series of pre-defined preview relationships, including customers, vendors, items, warehouses, projects, and work orders.

Drill Into
As an extension to the Preview option, the Drill Into option allows you to drill around into data related to the original records, and change the primary view and context of Business Insights Explorer to a new set of views. At the same time, context (for example, the specific customer) is passed from the original starting point to the new set of views as a filter. For instance, a customer service agent receives a call from a customer regarding a recent transaction. The agent can Drill Into the customer’s recent shipments or invoice payments. When the specific invoice is located, the agent may need additional related information such as the payments applied to that invoice. This can be accomplished by Drilling Into the invoice to find entries associated with that invoice.

Another powerful feature of the Drill Into option is the ability to navigate to a related view that contains custom preferences and predefined filters. A good example is a view that lists orders placed in the last 30 days. This customized view can then be saved for future use and quick navigation when viewing any customer’s information.

Analyze
Now you have the ability to organize, graph, and format summarized information within the Sage 500 ERP system. The new Business Insights Explorer module is tightly integrated to the Business Insights Analyzer module that was introduced in version 6.3. Allowing you to conduct a more detailed study, contextual mappings have been configured within both Business Insights Explorer and Business Insights Analyzer, so you can jump directly to specific Analyzer views. In addition to the direct link with Analyzer, custom filters are passed to Analyzer, forcing its engine to maintain the original Business Insights Explorer context.

Manage
The ability to act on information quickly is a critical advantage for any business. With the task management options provided by Business Insights Explorer, you have an easy mechanism for quickly accessing key Sage 500 ERP tasks for the entity being displayed. Each view contains a set of related tasks. For example, when viewing a customer, the tasks for updating the customer information or creating an order are readily accessible from the same view.

Personalize
The customization and personalization features originally pioneered with Business Insights Analyzer have continued with Business Insights Explorer. You have the same options for sorting, grouping, reorganizing, and renaming columns within the grid in addition to saving filtered views for future use. Uniquely, custom views can be used within the Explore function so that you can leverage them from other related views for navigational purposes.

Manufacturing Improvements
Phantom Routing Support
The number-one request from Sage 500 ERP manufacturing customers was to support phantom routings and bills of material—and Sage Software delivers! A phantom routing represents an item that is physically built, but rarely stocked, before being used in the next step or level of manufacturing. Sage 500 ERP's MRP logic will drive requirements straight through the phantom items to its components to facilitate the use of common bills of material for engineering and manufacturing.

New MRP Forecast Demand Smoothing Process
This new process gives you the powerful ability to forecast projected demand over various inventory periods through one of six different methods. You’ll forecast product sales in one set of easily defined business periods, while using the data to drive MRP and production in a set of shop floor or production facility working periods. The six smoothing methods include Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annually, and Planning.

Item and Warehouse Costing
Users will have the ability to mark multiple item and warehouse combinations as a standard routing for costing purposes using routing maintenance. It will take into consideration the different efficiencies that may exist within the various warehouse locations such as labor rates, raw materials, shipping costs, and available equipment.

Sage TimeSheet Enhancements
The 7.5 release includes Sage TimeSheet as part of the standard Sage 500 ERP package. This powerful time and expense application provides an alternative for the current eTimesheets application, so you can choose the time-tracking application that best meets your business practices. eTimesheets will continue to be included with Sage 500 ERP. The following features highlight Sage TimeSheet:

Enhanced Expense Tracking

• Resources now have the ability to enter expenses directly into a separate Expense Sheet View entry grid without loading a dialog from the time entry view. The expense sheet is similar to a spreadsheet, where the rows represent tasks and the columns represent dates. You can expand a task to view the expense codes (or expense groups) associated with the task. The intersection of each expense code row and column forms a cell to enter expenses.
• Organizations can leverage the Sage TimeSheet expense approval process to track and manage expense sheets separately from time sheets. This is convenient if your organization finalizes expenses and payroll for employees at different times. For example, approving employee time sheets occurs on a weekly basis but expense sheets on a monthly basis.

Project-Level Approval Process
Project managers can now review and approve employee hours and expenses for their projects. This is especially valuable if employees in your organization work on multiple projects. For example, your organization may have a Contingency Planning project and a Sales Analysis project. Employees in your organization may work on both of these projects; however, each project may have a different project manager. Now project managers can exclusively review and approve the number of employee hours and expenses for the project they manage.

Excel-Based Reporting
Sage TimeSheet extends the abundant reporting and analysis capabilities in Sage 500 ERP by allowing you to display detail report data in a predefined Microsoft Excel worksheet (*.xls) template. Creating a report template in Excel gives you access to specialized report features, such as pivot tables or pivot charts.

Core Enhancements
AP and AR Invoice Settlement A new settlement facility in Sage 500 ERP Accounts Payable helps to streamline the netting of AP and AR invoices where the vendor and the customer are the same company. You have the option to establish a relationship between a given vendor and one or more customers. A new settlement entry form will display the current vendor balance in addition to the associated customer’s balances. There is also an option to pick specific open invoices and apply them against the vendor balance. The posting process automatically creates the appropriate memo transactions in Sage 500 ERP Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable.

Create New From Existing
Quickly establish a new vendor, customer, or item by basing it on an existing record. Similar functionality has been incorporated throughout Sage 500 ERP as a standard feature. The new Expense Sheet View displays the value of each individual expense by task, as well as an expense total for each date and expense sheet period.