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Sage Software, Inc. - Sage MAS 90/200 ERP 4.1
800-854-3415
www.sagesoftware.com
Recently rebranded as Sage Software, the company's products, long known as MAS 90 and MAS 200, remain solid contenders in the mid- and high-end accounting markets. By the time this article goes to press, version 4.1 of these products, now with the "ERP" designation and "Sage" added to their names, will be available for production use. In March, 2004, Best Software introduced version 4.0 with a number of significant enhancements to the GL dataentry interface, a new wizard-based reporting tool called Business Insights, and the introduction of Business Object Interface (which enables developers and partners to integrate and customize MAS 90 and MAS 200 for business-specific scenarios without modifying the underlying source code of the application). Version 4.1 brings significant enhancements to the user interface and reporting capabilities.
After some comparison shopping, Anna Gabbard of Cincinnati, Ohio's Goodwill Industries (www.cincinnati goodwill.org) says her nonprofit organization had narrowed die choice to two vendors. "Local support and training for MAS 90 was a plus, and recommendations from other users was also an influential factor," Gabbard said.
The organization processes about 1,200 W-2s per year and has about 2,500 AP vendors, 2,800 AR customer records and 3,700 GL accounts. Gabbard appreciates the program's ease of use, the fact that the AP, AR, PO and GL modules all integrate nicely and that the program works with Crystal Reports. She also noted that the "Visual Integrator makes it possible to import data from payroll and sales without having to manually enter a lot of data." Gabbard has found MAS 90's user groups to be beneficial and says the local support and online knowledgebase have been very helpful as well.
MODULES AVAILABLE/SCALABILITY
Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 are best suited for companies with 10 to 500 employees. Both products share the same features and user interface but differ in their application architecture and overall processing capabilities. Sage MAS 90 is available for Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and NetWare and server networks running on the ProvideX database. A single-user version is also available. Sage MAS 200 is designed to support much larger enterprises 'with a thin-client architecture, higher performance, greater reliability and remote access support. Sage MAS 200...