Sage Line 50 Financial Controller 9

Over the years, Line 50 has become the preferred accounts package for small- to medium-sized businesses everywhere. This doesn't mean Line 50 is the best choice in all situations or that other accounting software (like Access, MYOB or QuickBooks) doesn't do a fine job. Sage just got there first and 200,000 users have kept it in pole position ever since.

With a full set of real-time integrated accounting modules, the top-of-the-range financial controller has little trouble justifying its existence. You get an accounting base of sales, purchase and nominal ledgers, which are augmented by sales and purchase order processing, all of which are linked to product and service invoicing. Multilevel stock control offers parts explosion (but not the real-time allocation suitable for telesales), and there are also full cashbook facilities to ensure easy entry and reconciliation of cash, bank and credit card dealings.

The financials module offers fast access to profit and loss reporting, audit trail analysis and VAT handling, while a fixed asset module keeps a database of assets and handles depreciation automatically. Prepayments, accruals, standing orders and nominal journals can all be saved for regular posting, as can skeleton invoices and orders.

Typical elements to arrive recently include specific tailored price lists to suit each customer or band of customers, multiple delivery addresses, batch posting of supplier payments and a 'shortfalls' screen to create purchase orders automatically for sales orders awaiting stock. The last release added most of these and a welcome speed increase, but otherwise wasn't much of an incentive to move up a notch for existing users. Version 9, however, rolls out a couple of real incentives for the Internet-connected upgrader and makes information much more accessible for the busy executive.

Most people think of e-business as trading on the web and offering e-commerce and online shopping facilities, but the real e-business possibly lies elsewhere. E-business actually makes its mark in the day-to-day transactions you exchange with your suppliers and customers alike. If you could exchange invoices and orders via the Internet, with no retyping of information, this would potentially save your company many hours of work and free someone from a boring task, leaving them more time to talk to customers.

Sage has been busy with the new transaction email feature and - providing your trading partners also use Sage - e-business is now a reality. Using XML-encoded emails with an order attached, Sage simply decodes this and posts the result to your live accounts. You do need to authorise everything on a one-by-one basis, but it still saves a huge amount of typing. However, you must both be using the same codes for stock items, otherwise it's down to manual mapping of their incoming codes each time, plus it will cost £100 per year after the first 30 days.

Sage has also put a lot of work into the new MIS (management information system). Although this needs Sage installed to work, it still provides simple browser-based access to executive information. You can tailor the screens to show just the data you require and drill down through the levels to get graphs and on-screen reports with a huge variety of detail.

The idea is to provide an overview of the business, with information like your top-selling product, top-performing customer and current stock value. Beneath this textual information, you can have a choice of graphs covering the top ten customers, product sales or various combinations from the monthly accounts. You're then able to change the view by selecting from either the Sales or Product menus, take a financial insight with highlights from debtors, creditors and bank balances, and finally study credit control detail for both supplier and customer payments. The end result is a polished performance without the need to get to grips with the accounting menus.