What You Need to Know About Sage Small Business Solutions

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One of the benefits of selecting an established brand like Sage Peachtree is the wide range of products and services that can be integrated to meet almost every need of small to mid-sized businesses. While you may not hear commercials or see advertising about Peachtree add-ons, this doesn’t mean such solutions don’t exist. In fact, in many cases, these add-ons are marketed as independent solutions in their own right, and the linkage with Peachtree is frequently minimized so that people don’t mistakenly believe that Sage Peachtree business management software is required to have a complete solution to a small business need. In addition, Sage offers market-leading applications for key small business needs such as contact management, time and billing, and payment processing. And although the focus of their marketing is on providing an excellent service, these applications also interface nicely with Sage Peachtree.

– Sage ACT! is a small company and workgroup contact management system that offers integrated contact management for Peachtree. A free tool called ACT! Link allows customers in Sage Peachtree to be linked to the activities and opportunity tracking tools in Sage ACT! The tool can be downloaded from www.peachtree.com/productsServices/peachtreeAddOns/act. Although the integration between Peachtree and ACT! has been in place for over 10 years, both products are so highly regarded in their respective markets (contact management and accounting software) that some sales people might consider Peachtree to be the financial software add-on for ACT!. Irrespective of which product you consider to be the “lead” for managing your business, ACT! should be on your short list of small business contact management software applications when working with entrepreneurs. More information on Sage ACT! is available at www.act.com.

– Sage Timeslips is a popular time and billing application used by many professionals, and has offered integration with Sage Peachtree for many years. A free two-way link with Sage Peachtree synchronizes key customer and client lists between the two applications and cross-posts payments, checks and purchases entered in Sage Peachtree as expense entries in Timeslips. Transactions posted in Timeslips are ported to Sage Peachtree as journal entries using the same application. More information on Sage Timeslips is available at www.sagetimeslips.com.

– Sage Payment Solutions is one of the leading credit card processing companies in North America and is providing innovative solutions to the PCI compliance challenges facing small businesses. Sage Payments Boss is a new Sage service offering that provides the ability to receive payments from anywhere using a supported smartphone. Sage Exchange is a secure online data vault that works with both Sage Payment Services and Sage Peachtree to store protected credit card information in a secure, PCI-compliant environment, which is linked to customer records in accounting software applications. Sage has also partnered with Trustwave to offer discounted merchant PCI certification, and partners with leading hardware device manufacturers such as Ingenico to offer the latest wired and wireless check, credit card and ACH payment processing services. Users can receive customer payments anywhere, at any time, seamlessly, safely and securely. More information on Sage Payment Solutions is available at www.sagepayments.com.

In addition to Sage’s product offerings, a wide range of products and services offer integration into the Peachtree ecosystem, either by bundling with Peachtree or by interfacing with the general ledger. Sage has a special relationship with LegalZoom.com, where businesses who incorporate on LegalZoom.com receive a free copy of Sage Peachtree. Some products, like MiSYS Small Business Manufacturing, are bundled by Sage with special industry editions of software like the Sage Peachtree Quantum Manufacturing Edition, while others like ESC Service Solutions (a solution for managing field service organizations) and Property BOSS (a property management solution) are sold separately and integrated by consultants or value added resellers. For more information on third party add-ons, visit www.peachtree.com/productsServices/peachtreeAddOns/thirdParty.

Peachtree isn’t the only accounting software application sold by Sage in North America. As Executive Editor Darren Root discusses in his column on page 3, Simply Accounting by Sage has re-been launched in the United States. While our friends to the north in Canada all know and love using Simply Accounting in both English and French (it is the dominant small business accounting software application in Canada), many U.S. accounting pros may have no experience with the program. After the discontinuation of Microsoft Office Accounting over a year ago, Simply Accounting by Sage is positioned as the only entry-level product in the U.S. market to offer simultaneous English and Spanish language functionality.

Another product you should learn more about is Sage Billing Boss, which is a free billing application for micro businesses. Billing Boss is operated as a Software as a Service (SaaS) application, and requires only a browser or a smartphone client application to generate presentation quality one-time and recurring invoices. Invoice templates can be set up for each customer so that recurring invoices are created weekly, monthly or annually. Invoices can be printed and mailed, or can be electronically delivered via e-mail or a portal. Businesses can accept electronic payments online through services like PayPal or Sage Payment Solutions (other services are accessible for an extra fee). Billing Boss also integrates with Payments Boss to allow businesses to both bill and collect from anywhere at any time.

Although most of you know about Sage for its mid-range and enterprise business systems such as MAS 90 ERP, MAS 200 ERP, MAS 500 ERP, Sage ACCPAC, Sage X3, Sage Timberline, Sage Abra, Sage CRM and SalesLogix, the vendor has a thriving suite of applications for businesses of any size. If you are recommending or supporting small business software, I encourage you to broaden your horizons to look beyond just one application. I think you will be pleasantly surprised about the features and depth of industry support in Sage’s small business applications, and I hope you will learn more about the company’s outreach to accounting professionals at www.sageaccountantsnetwork.com. n