Since you’re reading this article (unless you’re an AI bot), you have interest in Sage 500 (likely lovingly calling it “MAS 500” out of habit) and are most likely a long-time user. You’ve probably heard the rumors about sunsetting, and you’re pretty comfortable staying where you’re at—kind of…
Hopefully you’re looking for ways to improve your experience. (It’s still possible, beneficial, and very rewarding to leverage your investment to increase your profits and enjoy your workflow.)
You might have already noticed Sage 500 isn’t something a lot of resellers want to support or focus on, and it has fallen off of their corporate strategy priority list. Many prominent Sage 500 resellers have sold their practices, re-tasked employees, and refocused on alternate technologies.
As time goes on, the number of available consulting partners and resources for future Sage 500 projects will lessen, it will become harder to find talented and responsive consultants to assist.
Xcellerated Solutions has its roots DEEP in Sage 500—before the days of MAS 500—when the elders at State-of-the-Art Computing reverently labeled it “Acuity”. Our founders were in the first wave of consultants and developers to immerse ourselves in the famed-buffet-laden week-long trainings in Irvine, California. (We won’t mention how much fun it was in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s to use our boredom/training time—they used to almost read the manuals to you out loud—to find ways to hack the presenter’s PC and have it do fun things like launch Minesweeper on the projector screen. Windows had some fun back doors in those days, and rooms full of bored programmer nerds tend to get creative…)
I have traveled all over the United States (and even outside) to provide training for teams of developers (both Sage partners and clients’ dev teams) in the early 2000’s, teaching how to use various SQL and desktop application programming tools to customize Sage 500. I was (at first for a former employer, and the past 17 years for Xcellerated Solutions) a developer on many ground-breaking projects that hadn’t been previously been done before (things like LockBox integrations to Cash Receipts batches, creation of pending invoices and automated statements from a health insurance policy management system, corporate-level collaborative integrations with Magento and WebJaguar and HighJump (in addition to Shopify, Amazon, nopCommerce, and others), fully-automated EDI customizations, and database level splitting of companies into separate SQL environments—including purge of test company data.
We have several database experts with DEEP SQL experience. (We have successfully troubleshot and managed (DBA) massively complex SQL environments with datacenters on multiple continents with $Billions in revenue.)
As a trained/degreed accountant (who got his start at a CPA firm), I’ve trained my team to be DEEPLY experienced in all aspects of accounting and the flow of documents into and from accounting systems—even when they are code junkies (most of them ARE!) I win 100% of T-Account competitions against accounting professors, CFO’s and Controllers, and even CPA’s. I’ve never lost a competition, and they have always bought me a congratulatory dinner afterwards. (It’s pretty cool how well we understand the accounting side of ERP systems. It’s fun to be able to have intelligent conversations—and sometimes act as interpreters for—accountants and IT people. We live in both worlds.)
Although we do development and consulting work for MANY ERP systems, we’ve spent so much time with Sage 500 that we can’t help but love working with it.
As long as we (and Sage 500) are still going strong (I’ll probably not retire for at least a decade, and may decide to wait for two), we will keep working with clients who want to use Sage 500.
If you need advice, help, or an ambulance for your Sage 500 environment, PLEASE reach out to us—a 15-minute discussion might be eye-opening!
Strategies for Sage 500:
- Get a new perspective—talk to us and let’s see if we can fix some headaches.
- Evaluate problem points in your workflow—can we help eliminate (or at least improve) them through automation or integration?
- Eliminate all manual data entry points that could be sourced electronically—let’s integrate your islands of information!
- NEVER hand-key EDI data again—let’s use everything Sage 500 has to offer and eliminate all chance for mis-keys.
- Leverage your data—let BI and reporting tools (both statistical and financial reports) do their job—we can set these things up.
- Optimize your database—we can help with configuration of your server environment and can tune things to speed up your reporting SIGNIFICANTLY.
- Contact Xcellerated Solutions (button BELOW!) and set up a no-obligation discussion to see if we can help…