What's new in Sage 200 Professional

You can now send email notifications by using these new flows that we've provided. Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based service that makes it practical and simple for people to build workflows that automate business tasks and processes across applications and services.

• The purchase requisitions flow automatically sends emails to people to notify them during the authorisation process.

  • Authorisers will receive email notifications when they have new purchase requisitions that require authorisation.
  • The person who submitted the purchase requisition will receive an email notification when it is authorised or rejected.

• The supplier bank details flow automatically sends emails to people to notify them of any changes to the bank details for supplier accounts.

  • The emails are sent to everyone that has user access to the Audit Log, so that they can check the changes in the log.

To set up these flows for email notifications, see Set up Microsoft Power Automate with Sage 200.

Following feedback we received from you, we are pleased to announce these improvements for bank reconciliation:

• If you don't want to reconcile the full amount of the transaction, you can part reconcile the transaction by entering the Amount to Reconcile for the transaction, before you match it.

  The remaining amount of the transaction can be reconciled the next time you do your bank reconciliation.

  The transaction will be marked with a status of Part, to indicate it has been part reconciled.

• You can now see the URN of a transaction when you reconcile or unreconcile.

See Reconcile using a bank statement.

See Reconcile using bank feeds.

Now you can attach files and scanned documents when you view sales invoices and credit notes, confirm receipt of goods or services received (GRNs), and view the delivery history of a purchase order or return.

• When you use the Customer Transaction Enquiry, select a sales invoice or credit note, then select Attached Documents.
• When you use the Nominal Transaction Enquiry, view the transaction detail for a sales invoice or credit note, then select Attached Documents.
• When you Confirm Goods Received and Confirm Service / Text Items Received, select the Attach Documents check box before you select Save.
• When you view the Delivery history for purchase orders and returns, select Despatches or Deliveries , then select Attached Documents.

See Scan and attach documents.

As of March 2021, those working in the UK's construction industry might have to handle and pay VAT in a different way following the introduction of the new VAT reverse charge system for the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS).

For supplies of certain specified construction services, the customer will be liable to account to HMRC for the VAT for these purchases instead of the supplier. The reverse charge will include goods, where those goods are supplied with the specified services.

• See CIS reverse charge - common questions.
• To set up your reverse charge VAT rates for the CIS, see Reverse charge VAT rates for the CIS (UK only).

• You can now set your EORI number in company details. This is required by UK companies trading in the EU, and Irish companies trading outside the EU.

  Open: Accounting System Manager > Settings > Company Details.

• You can now set the Country of Origin for a stock item when using a UK company. This feature was previously only available for Irish companies.

  Open: Stock Control > Stock Records > Amend Stock Item Details and select the Analysis tab.

• If you can't open a feature because other people are using a related feature, such as changing settings, you can now see a list of who is preventing access. See Unable to access feature error message.

• Based on your feedback, you can now show the default contact's email address on the Customers List and Suppliers List.

  To add the column, right-click inside the list, then select Columns > Contact Email.

• We've changed the calculations for the totals on invoices and orders when notional VAT rates are used. See Notional VAT effects on order and invoice totals.

You can now export and update information for nominal accounts, customer and supplier accounts, and stock items.

This makes updating the information easier if you need to make a lot of changes.

The information is exported to a file in the same format used for an import. This means you can export information and make changes to it using an external tool (such as Excel), and then import your updated information back into Sage 200.

• What can I import, export and update?
• Import and export nominal account information.
• Import and export customer accounts.
• Import and export supplier accounts.
• Import and export stock items.

Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your data into immersive and interactive insights. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, discover what's important, and share that with anyone you want.

You can connect Power BI to Sage 200 to analyse your company data. Sage 200 includes some example reports to get you started, but you can also build your own reports to share with other people inside your organisation.

See Power BI.

You can control who can view and amend supplier bank details by setting access to the feature Bank Details. This feature allows you to show or hide the Bank tab for all supplier accounts.

See Control access to supplier bank details.

You can now open or close an accounting period for all modules at once, rather than having to open them individually.

Open: Settings > Organisation and Financial > Accounting Periods.

• Select any module in the period, then click Open All or Close All.

See Open accounting periods and Close accounting periods.

You can now save supplier remittances to cloud document storage, so that you can view or print them at a later date.

See Save printed documents to cloud document storage.

Following feedback we received from you, we are pleased to announce these improvements for purchase requisitions:

• You can choose whether supplier and nominal accounts are required for purchase requisitions.

• The combined budget can be set for each individual line in the requisition, rather than apply to all lines in the requisition.
• You can restrict the nominal code in a requisition to be linked to the combined budget.
• You can now amend rejected requisitions, so you can make changes and submit them again.

• Authorisers can amend purchase requisitions submitted by other people.

• If you select a warehouse on a free text item in a requisition, the warehouse will be applied to the purchase order line.

• When you make changes to a purchase order that's linked to a requisition, you can choose what happens to the requisition lines.

  • If you cancel an order or delete lines in an order, you can choose whether the linked requisition lines are cancelled or can be re-ordered.
  • If you reduce the quantity of an item in an order that's linked to multiple requisitions, you can allocate the remaining quantity to the requisition lines.
  • If you write off an order, the requisition lines are cancelled.
• You can now set access permissions to control separately who can authorise requisitions, and who can authorise and generate orders.

See Purchase requisitions.

See Set user access to purchase requisition features.

• You can now view customers, invoices and payments in the Invoice Payments Portal.

  See Use the Invoice Payments Portal.

• We've changed the Pay Now button so it's easier to add the button to your custom invoice layouts.

  See Add a Pay Now button to custom invoices for Invoice Payments.

• You can now customise the payment message displayed on invoice layouts.

  See Change the text displayed on invoices.

• You can record invoices as paid offline, if your customer pays the invoice using an alternative method to Invoice Payments.

  See Record an invoice that has been paid offline.

• If you cancel an invoice, it'll be removed from the Invoice Payments service, so your customer cannot pay the invoice by mistake. If your customer does click the Pay Now button on their invoice, they'll see a message to say that you have cancelled the invoice and no payment is due.

• You can check which customers have been uploaded in the Customers List, by displaying the Invoice Payments column.

  See Upload customers to Invoice Payments (GoCardless).

• You'll be notified if payments are outside the range permitted by GoCardless of 1-5000 GBP / EUR.

• When you enter a purchase order or return, you can select a warehouse when you add a free text item.

  The warehouse address will be included on printed orders and returns, so this means that your items are delivered to (or collected from) the right location.

• If you select a warehouse on a free text item in a purchase requisition, the warehouse will be applied to the purchase order line.

See Record a purchase order.

Now you can attach files and scanned documents when you enter nominal journals and VAT returns. You can scan images directly using a scanner connected to your PC or your network.

• When you enter a nominal journal, select Save and Attach.
• When you produce a VAT return, you'll be able to add attachments to the return.

The attachments can also be viewed and amended:

• When you use the nominal transaction enquiry, or view waiting postings, select Attached Documents.
• When you view Completed Period Totals for a VAT return, select Attached Documents.

See Scan and attach documents.

Use the audit log to check for any changes that have been made in key areas of Sage 200, such as:

• Changes to supplier bank details.
• Changes to submitted purchase requisitions by their authoriser.

See Audit log.

• We've changed the name of Sage Payments to Supplier Payments.
• We've added a welcome page and a new Sage 200 Home desktop home page, so it's easier to find out what's new in Sage 200.

Sage Invoice Payments is a great way for your customers to pay you online, quickly and easily.

Use Sage Invoice Payments to request and receive payments from your customers by using Stripe, PayPal, or GoCardless. When your customer pays the invoice, the transactions can be downloaded and posted in Sage 200.

Invoice Payments integrates seamlessly with Sage 200, making it easier for your customers to pay you, and easier for you to process those payments.

• Set up Sage Invoice Payments in Sage 200 and choose the payment providers that you'll offer to your customers:
  • Stripe, to receive payments from credit card and debit cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay.
  • PayPal, to receive PayPal payments.
  • GoCardless, to collect payments using Direct Debit.
• Create and email an invoice to your customer using an Invoice Payments layout.
• When your customer receives the email, they click a Pay Now button on the invoice, and make the payment using one of the payment providers you've set up.
• Once the payment is received, Sage 200 will download the transactions and automatically make postings.

See Take payments using Invoice Payments.

You can use cross-selling items to help speed up entering a full sales order. Cross-selling items are complimentary items which are often sold together with another stock item. For example, if you sell a printer, you might want to show print cartridges or cables for that printer.

Set up cross-selling items if you want to display and add these items when you enter a sales order.

• To set up cross-selling items for a stock item, amend the stock item and use the Cross-selling tab.

• Once you've finished setting up all your cross-selling items for your stock items, enable the option to Allow users to select items for cross-selling.

• When you enter a full sales order and add a standard stock item, click Save and Cross-sell to add a cross-selling item.

See Cross-selling stock items.

Suggested items can help you speed up entering a sales order, as you can quickly add items that the customer has previously bought from you.

When you enter a full sales order, select Suggested items to see items that are specific to the customer.

Suggested items include:

• The customer's preferred items (you can think of these as 'favourites').
• Items that the customer has recently ordered.
• Items that the customer has frequently ordered, for example you can see items they've ordered at least 3 times in the last 6 months.

See Suggested items for customers.

You can set up alerts on a customer account, to show messages whenever you deal with that customer. For example, if a customer has specific requirements, you can set up a reminder message that will be displayed whenever you enter an order for that customer.

Alerts are displayed when you select the customer account, and you can choose when to show the alert. For example, you can show alerts when entering invoices or credit notes, sales orders and returns, quotations and pro forma invoices, and for customer price enquiries.

Alerts are specific to an individual customer, and you can set up multiple alerts for each customer.

See Customer alerts.

Now you can attach files and scanned documents when you enter purchase invoices and credit notes. You can scan images directly using a scanner connected to your PC or your network.

• When you create a purchase invoice or credit note, select Save and Attach.

The attachments can also be viewed and amended when you authorise transactions, and when you view transactions in the supplier and nominal transaction enquiries.

• When you authorise a transaction, or view the transaction in the enquiry, select Attached Documents.

See Scan and attach documents.

Get in touch with a customer or supplier using Skype for Business.

When you're viewing a customer or supplier account, just click the Skype icon next to a contact's email address.

Now you can view a customer or supplier address using Google Maps.

When you're viewing a customer or supplier account, just click the Google Maps icon next to the address.

Reducing balance depreciation for fixed assets

If you set up depreciation for a fixed asset using the reducing period balance method, it could be difficult to calculate the period depreciation rate to use. Now you can click the % button to calculate the percentage rate to use, when you want to depreciate an asset by a total percentage over a set number of periods.

See Create fixed assets.

Spooler list filters

You can now use filters on the print Spooler list, to only show the reports you're interested in. You can filter the spooler list by report name, the user who produced the document, the company, the date of the report, or the status of the report.

See Spooler.

Improvements that you've suggested

Following feedback we received from you on the Ideas Hub, we are pleased to announce these improvements:

Purchase requisitions

When you enter a purchase requisition, you can now search for nominal codes with a particular cost centre or department. To do this, enter a slash / between the code, cost centre and department (nominal code / cost centre / department).

For example:

• Searching for /FAF/ will show all nominal codes with a cost centre of FAF.
• Searching for 4//ADM will show all nominal codes starting with 4 and with a department of ADM.

Import remembers last file location

When you import information, Sage 200 will now remember the last folder that you used for an import.

Sort columns on bank reconciliation

Now when you use bank reconciliation, you can sort the lists of matched and unmatched transactions. Just click on a column heading to sort a list.

Following feedback we received from you on the Ideas Hub, we are pleased to announce these improvements to quotes and pro formas.

• Enter pro forma invoices for prospect customers. Using a prospect account means you don't have to create new customer accounts that you might never use.

  Open: Sales Order Processing > Pro Forma Invoices > Enter New Pro Forma for Prospect.

• Convert quotations to pro forma invoices. This is useful if a customer wants an invoice following receipt of a quotation. The pro forma can then be converted to a sales order, and processed in the usual way.

  Open: Sales Order Processing > Quotations > Convert Quotation to Pro Forma.

• Check the progress of quotations with new quotation reports. You can see quotations that have converted to sales orders, and quotations that have been converted to pro formas, but have not yet been completed.

  Open: Sales Order Processing > Reports > Status > Converted Quotations.

  Open: Sales Order Processing > Reports > Status > Quotations with Outstanding Pro Formas.

See Create a pro forma invoice for a prospect.

See Convert quotations to pro formas.

Do you have nominal accounts, bank accounts, or combined budgets that you're no longer using, or don't want to use just yet?

You can hide the account or budget from lists, so it can't be selected by mistake.

Just edit the account or budget, and set the Active Status to Hidden.

See Hide or show a nominal account.

See Hide or show a bank account.

See Hide or show a combined nominal budget.

This feature was added following feedback we received from you on the Ideas Hub.

Restrict nominal account selection

You can now restrict how you select nominal accounts, to ensure that you can only select accounts with a valid nominal account code, cost centre, and department.

See Restrict account selection to existing and active accounts.

Budget v Actuals standard reports

Use these reports to see how much you've spent from your budgets and how much remains, so you can check if you're under or over budget.

Open: Nominal Ledger > Reports > Budget Comparisons.

• Budget v Actuals By Cost Centre, to group by cost centre.
• Budget v Actuals By Cost Department, to group by department.
• Budget v Actuals By Nominal Type, to group by nominal account type (expense, income, asset, liability).

See How to report on your budgets.

Use the Pegg chatbot to view details of your customers in a simple way, using your favourite messaging apps.

You can view customer contact details, recent invoices and credits, and their account balance and credit limit.

Pegg is available for Sage 200 customers that have a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Note: This is a beta release of the Pegg chatbot, and we plan to improve this service in future releases.

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force on 25 May 2018, and this will affect how you should collect and process data that you collect about an individual.

To help you get ready for the GDPR, we've added some new reports that will help you find information in Sage 200.

• Find contact details for an individual.

  Open: Accounting System Manager > System Utilities > General Data Protection Regulation > GDPR Contact Check.

• Find old customer or supplier accounts.

  Open: Sales Ledger > Reports > Account Analysis > Customers With No Transactions From.

  Open: Purchase Ledger > Reports > Account Analysis > Suppliers With No Transactions From.

See Managing your contact information (GDPR).

As part of their plans to modernise the tax system, the Government is changing the way VAT registered businesses create and submit VAT Returns.

From April 2018, HMRC are running a pilot scheme, giving businesses the opportunity to submit VAT returns via the new system and help shape the new digital process.

Note: Available to UK customers only.

The following lists will now refresh automatically when you add or edit an item in the list:

• Sales Order List.
• Invoicing List.
• Purchase Order List.
• Stock List.
• Price Book List.

This feature was added following feedback we received from you on the Ideas Hub.

Bank feeds rules help make data entry and bank reconciliation even easier.

You can use bank feeds rules to automatically create transactions in Sage 200 for your bank transactions that you download from Sage bank feeds. This saves you time entering transactions, and helps you reconcile your bank accounts more efficiently and reduce errors.

Bank feeds rules can be set up to create customer receipts and payments, supplier payments and receipts, and nominal transactions.

See Bank feeds rules.

Watch Bank Feeds Rules (video).

You can use the Sage Contact app to see details of your Sage 200 customers and suppliers in Outlook for Microsoft 365. You can view and update contact details, add memos, and view account balances and recent transactions. All of the changes you make in Outlook are synchronised with Sage 200.

See Use the Sage Contact app with Microsoft 365.

Watch Sage Contact app (video).

Save printed documents to cloud document storage in PDF format, so that they can be viewed with everyone in your company.

You can save customer invoices, credit notes, statements and debtor letters, despatch notes, and purchase orders.

Documents are saved to your server, and can then be synchronised to the cloud using OneDrive for Business or Dropbox.

See Save printed documents to cloud document storage.

Watch Save printed documents to cloud document storage (video).

Check budgets

If you use purchase authorisation, you can check that purchase orders you are about to authorise will not exceed the budgets set on your nominal accounts.

If you enable Check budgets when authorising purchase orders, Sage 200 will check your nominal account budgets each time you authorise a purchase order. A warning is displayed when you try to authorise the order if the value of any item on the purchase order will exceed the nominal budget linked to that item, or any item on the purchase order contains a blank or invalid nominal account code.

See Order processing (POP settings).

Original budget values

When you enter your nominal account budgets, or import budgets, you can now set an Original Budget figure. This is useful if you want to keep a record of the initial budget amount so that you can compare it against any changes to the budget.

See Set up nominal budgets.

Budget vs Actuals Excel report

Use this report to see how much you've spent from your budgets and how much remains, so you can check if you're under or over budget.

You can compare your nominal account budget figures against your actual and committed expenditure, and view figures for selected periods or an annual budget. Use the slicers to view details by cost centre, department, report category, individual nominal accounts or a combined nominal budget.

Note: This report is available if you subscribe to Sage 200 Services Extra.

Open: Excel Reporting > Excel Reports.

See How to report on your budgets.

Period Budgets report

Use this report to check the budget figures per period that you have set for your nominal accounts. For example, you might want to compare past, current and future budget figures for a selection of nominal accounts.

Open: Nominal Ledger > Reports > Budget Comparisons > Period Budgets.

Sage bank feeds is a free secure service that you can use to download your bank transactions to Sage 200, to help you reconcile your bank account.

This reduces the time that you spend reconciling your bank transactions, and ensures your accounts are up to date and accurate.

Once you download your bank transactions, you can match them to the existing transactions in Sage 200, or create new transactions if something is missing. This means that transactions in your live bank account are reflected in Sage 200. Sage 200 will remember which transactions you have matched, ready for your next bank reconciliation.

Read more about Sage Bank Feeds.

We now include more Excel reports for free as part of Sage 200 Services, and additional reports are available with Sage 200 Services Extra.

See Excel Reporting - list of reports.