Names for Sage accounting systems

If Sage’s decision to change the names of many of their accounting products has left you a little disorientated, you’re not alone. After using Pastel Partner, for example, to run your business for years, suddenly you find to your great surprise that you’re now using a Sage 50cloud product. It all seems unnecessarily confusing on the face of it, but on closer inspection you’ll start to see some method to their madness.

The main purpose behind the rebranding of the various Sage accounting products is to consolidate them into suites. This will make it much easier to identify the software best suited to your needs.

Into the cloud

These days many SME owners want to be able to run their businesses on the go, and this has increased the demand for cloud-based software. To this end, Sage has developed Sage Business Cloud, a suite of online accounting platforms that cater to a wide spectrum of needs.

In early 2018, Sage Business Cloud Accounting and Sage Business Cloud Accounting Start replaced what was known as Sage One Accounting and Sage One Start.

Sage Business Cloud Accounting Start is the most basic system within this suite, offering the ability to easily generate invoicing and track income vs expenses. As your business grows and you need more functionality such as inventory control and multiple price lists, it’s easy to upgrade to Sage Business Cloud Accounting.

A handy feature of Sage Business Cloud Accounting is its ability to allocate payments to invoices automatically once the bank receives the funds.

Sage 50cloud Pastel

Pastel accounting packages have been around since forever. Sage has taken these tried and tested systems, given them a facelift and rebranded them as the Sage 50cloud suite.

The term “50cloud” might be a bit misleading as these systems need a local server to run and are not innately cloud-based. They do, however, have the ability to automatically send updates to a cloud facility at an additional cost, as well as integrate with Microsoft Office 365. One drawback is that only one user can access the cloud database at a time, effectively locking out all other users until he or she is done.

Sage 50cloud Pastel Xpress (formerly Sage Pastel Xpress)

This solution allows you to manage your accounting, invoicing, cash flow, inventory, VAT, and more.

With the Microsoft Office integration, you can sync your contacts and other records to Pastel Xpress, and you can also export to Excel with ease.

Keeping track of income and expenses is made easy with Sage 50cloud Pastel Xpress. You can post transactions to the cloud from your phone or tablet, and you can accept direct bank feeds for easy reconciliation of payments.

Sage 50cloud Pastel Partner (formerly Sage Pastel Partner)

This system is similar to the Xpress solution above, except with more functionality. Extra features include (some at an additional cost):

• A report writer
• Multi-currency
• Bill of materials
• Project tracker

Sage Evolution

The rebranding of the Standard and Premium versions of this product to Sage 100 Evolution and Sage 200 Evolution respectively appears to be largely cosmetic. Essentially it’s a straight name change. To be fair, the Sage Evolution suite needed very little improvement as it works very well. And as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Sage 100 Evolution (formerly Sage Evolution Standard)

Sage 100 Evolution is an accounting and business management ERP for medium-size enterprises. Manage operations, draw reports, and identify trends and opportunities from one interface.

Using add-on modules such as Sage Intelligence Reporting, CRM and Point of Sale, you can tailor your system to best suit your needs

Sage 200 Evolution (formerly Sage Evolution Premium)

This upgrade offers everything Sage 200 Evolution does, plus a bit extra. Additional functionality includes:

• Segmented GL accounts
• Segmented inventory items
• The ability to import cost allocations
• An alert manager

Sage 300cloud (formerly Sage ERP Accpac)

As with Sage Evolution, this appears to have been pretty much a straight name change. Formerly known as Accpac, Sage 300cloud provides an ERP solution aimed at streamlining business management and accounting processes for small to mid-market companies with up to several hundred users.

This system supports multiple companies, currencies and languages, and offers tools to help with the management of workflow and the attainment of KPIs.

Disclaimer – Stock2Shop advises that you contact Sage directly for advice when deciding on the best package to suit your requirements. We will not accept liability for inaccuracies or outdated information contained within this article.