Sage 500 ERP is a solid product with years of stability, customer successes and enhancements. Like any software application, though, Sage 500 ERP doesn’t address every need or requirement for every business. Sage 500 ERP customers often look to fill the functional gaps with third party add-on solutions.
Sage has a vibrant third party solution community including products that are endorsed by Sage, ensuring that development, connectivity, testing and compatibility criteria meet, and exceed, Sage’s development standards.
So, here are the top 5 add-ons for Sage 500 ERP as ranked by RKL eSolutions customer requests and installations.
Document Management solutions manage, track and store the documents behind everyday business transactions throughout the operation. Storage protocols provide easy-to-find location utilities and security to protect critical information. Integrated workflow processes with Sage 500 ERP means documents are linked to transactional and Masterfile records for audit traceability and end-user analysis.
Watch the Document Managment for Sage Webinar Replay
2. Sales Tax:
Sales tax schedules, compliance, and reporting have become complex and tedious tasks
for businesses to manage. Businesses are required to understand taxability rules and rates for individual item SKUs and services across multiple variants of state, county, city, and even street. Avalara has emerged as the industry-standard among Sales Tax add-ons for all major ERP publishers. Avalara delivers sales tax compliance and reporting business rules and guarantees audit protection making ‘sales tax simple’.
3. EDI:
EDI used to be reserved for Big Box Retailers but even small businesses are finding ways to leverage EDI to automate transactional processing like Purchases, Sales and Advance Ship Notifications. Companies that utilize EDI can eliminate manual data entries, errors and automate communications throughout the Supply Chain.
4. Budgeting & Planning:
Sage 500 ERP, like most midmarket ERP solutions delivers minimum budgeting and planning capabilities by GL Account and Fiscal Year. However, most financial officers desire budgeting capabilities to allocate capital expenses and operational budgets by company-specific algorithms like headcount, square footage or utilization, to name a few. Today’s CFOs, Controllers and Financial Planners often turn to excel to manage the planning formulas, budgeting periods and comparative analysis tools to manage this information outside of the GL. There are several budgeting & planning add-ons for Sage 500 ERP depending on your requirements, price point, and user interface preferences.
5. Hosting:
Sage 500 ERP is natively a client-server application commonly deployed on-premise. However, Cloud computing is a growing trend among businesses today as executives look for ways to reduce security threats, decrease IT infrastructure and costs. Cloud hosting options for Sage 500 ERP customers include private hosting service providers like Expedient and public hosting service providers like Amazon Web Services and RackSpace.
While these add-ons represent the most common requests we get from our Sage 500 ERP customers, there are hundreds of other business applications available. The team at RKL eSolutions maintains a directory of carefully vetted, third party solution providers that we recommend to our customers.
Throughout the year, we host webinar events to educate our customers about potential add-ons to address the most common business challenges our customers encounter. We also strive to offer our customers choices, when possible, of multiple solution providers.
If you have a specific requirement, contact your account manager or submit a request to sales@rklesolutions.com. We would be happy to explore your specific need and potential solutions to extend your Sage 500 ERP investment.