Tag: Featured

Well if your Sage is already configured for electronic payments then it should be as simple as 1,2,3.

This week’s Tip of the week explains how to set up e-banking so that Sage produces a file to upload supplier payments to your bank.

To do this, the plugin for the relevant bank account needs to be installed for every user who will be making Sage payments.

Any user who tries to make a payment but doesn’t have the relevant plugin will receive an error message like the one to the left.

You will require administration permissions to install the plug in.

The easiest way to install these is to go to the cog in the top right hand menu of Sage 200 and then, Installers > Install eBanking components.

You will be asked to run the installer. A wizard will then appear for you to click through, during this process you may be asked for admin credentials. If you don’t have these then this is something provided by your IT provider.

To check that the components have been installed successfully go to your ‘Bank Account List’ and click to amend one of your accounts, navigate to the E-Banking tab and check that a list is visible next to ‘E-Banking service:’

If the components are listed then proceed to ‘Configure your E-banking service’ otherwise continue with the below troubleshooting.

If there is still no dropdown then you can try installing the specific plugin for your bank. The first step is to close your Sage applications. Then navigate here: https://my.sage.co.uk/public/sage-ebanking/compatible-banks.aspx

Locate your bank account name and click ‘Download plug-in’ next to the relevant account type.

Again you will be asked to run the installer. A wizard will then appear for you to click through, during this process you may be asked for admin credentials. If you don’t have these then this is something provided by your IT provider.

Re-open Sage 200 and navigate to amend your cash book account. Check if the dropdown against the E-Banking tab now contains the name of your bank account.

If your account is still not listed in the dropdown then this is usually because you have insufficient privileges to install the plugin, in which case please refer to your IT provider to check.

Once the components are installed successfully you need to configure your cash book account.

Navigate to the Cash Book > Bank Account List. Highlight the bank account from which these payments are to be made and click ‘amend account’

Go to the E-Banking tab, and next to ‘E-Banking Service’ select your account name.

Next to ‘E-Banking Functions’ select ‘Payments Only’

Then click ‘File Locations’

When you run generate payments to E-banking accounts Sage outputs a file which you then use to upload your payments to your bank account.

Within ‘File Locations’ you can set the location that Sage will automatically save this, click ‘Browse’ next to the ‘Directory’ and navigate to a suitable file location.

Your bank will require the upload file to either be a TXT or CSV file. You can find this out from your bank account or from another user who already has this set up. You must identify this against the ‘File extension’, enter either TXT or CSV in this box.

Click ‘OK’ and then ‘Save’ your bank account. You are now ready to generate Sage payments.

It means that if you ever lose the ability to see a column on a list view, a column within a screen or have any other issues in Sage, you can easily set it back to the default settings.

This Tip of the Week will go through exactly what you need to know and how to do it.

To start go to the Tools option (the cog icon) in the top right-hand corner of Sage 200.

From the subsequent drop down menu choose ‘Preferences‘

You can then choose the option to ‘Reset desktop settings‘

This removes any changes made to the desktop, for example, column choices, and resets the desktop back to the Default values.

In these times, you may want to set a new stock item up, to track the sales or usage for the new item,

Issues can arise that when users raise orders, they then select the old item in error, causing discrepancies on stock and confusion when orders are processed.  

To prevent these mistakes from happening, you can set an item to be inactive. Making an item inactive can be a permanent or a temporary thing and doing this will not lose any history of sale, purchase, or movement.

There are times when you are using Sage 200 and you need to run a process, but you cannot find it anywhere.

Thus leaving you frustrated after blindly opening and closing options in order to find the right one. Thankfully on all current versions of Sage 200, you can utilise the Search Menu option.

To search in the Sage 200 menu you need to use the search function that appears at the top of the tree view.

To find the function that is eluding you, click on the Search Menu bar and type in a word or words of what you want to do. For example, I’m looking for Bank Reconciliation.

So in the Search Menu area, I type Reconciliation – it’s not case sensitive but if you are unsure of the correct spelling, type what you are sure of.

Once typed, press ‘Enter’ or ‘Return’ and it will show the results. When the correct option is found, you can right click on the option and click on “Show in menu” so you know where it will be next time.

You can use the same stock unit for sales and purchases, or additional trade unit measure can be set up to differentiate between sales and purchases.

A base unit measure is needed and works with different measures when buying, selling or storing an item. The base unit establishes a relationship between the other measures used for the stock item and enables quantities to be converted by means of a ratio.

First, you will need to set up your ‘Units of Measure’ in stock maintenance, these will be available to select from the stock code later

The default ratio is how many EACHS will usually be contained in the unit of measure name

Next, the product groups must be changed to allow stock items to have units of measure, here you can set the defaults for the product group, however, you can customise these later for individual stock items:

Unit Settings

• The base unit establishes a relationship between the other measures used for the stock item and enables quantities to be converted by means of the ratio, usually recommended to leave as ‘Each’
• The stock unit is how you usually stock your items. This is the unit of measure that will show in your stock balances and also the default for sales and purchase orders

Use Multiple Units

• Tick both of the ‘Selling’ boxes if you would like the option to sell stock items in anything other than the stock unit
• Tick both of the ‘Buying’ boxes if you would like the option to buy stock items in anything other than the stock unit

Sales and Purchase Units

• Here you can add default units of measure for the product group

Now you will be able to see these defaults when setting up new stock item codes

Within the details tab is where you can customise the stock unit (how the item is shown in stock balances and defaults for sales and purchase orders)

* It is important to note that you cannot change this once there has been any usage of this stock item code, you would have to set up a new sock item *

Buying and selling prices both look to the stock unit code and will adjust by the ratio when changing the unit of measure within a purchase or sales order.

This is demonstrated later. However, it is possible to have pricing set differently if you require

Within the units of measure tab on the stock item code, you can now add or remove any units of measure you would like.

This is where you can view a list of units of measure specific to that stock item.

If you select to ADD or EDIT a unit of measure you will see an additional pop up box appears

Unit name

• This will allow you to choose from the units of measure you prepare din the first step in the stock maintenance menu

Conversion ratio

• This section enables to change the default ratio if required

Precision

• If you change the precision it will tell Sage to stop you selling certain fractions of the pack. For example if you will only ever it as a whole pack you can change this to 1. If you are happy to sell/buy this as half a pack you can change if to 0.5

• You don’t have to change the precision, however is someone enters 0.5 on a sales or purchase order, Sage will allow it

Once you have configured the stock items you are now ready to use different units of measure on sales and purchase orders

If the stock item code has units of measure set up you will be able to change it within the sales and purchase orders as demonstrated below

Make sure to change it in the ‘Selling price unit’ as well as the ‘Selling unit’ this will allow sage to recalculate the price according to the ratio

In the example a ‘pack of 100’ is 60, therefore a ‘pack of 1000’ is £600

This works exactly the same in both purchase orders and sales order, providing the product group was selected to allow units of measure for both buying and selling

To identify this missing purchase invoice, you may notice that an invoice may show as entered against the purchase order but hasn’t hit the supplier account.

You may also notice this if you get an error regarding batch transactions when trying to generate payments.

These missing invoices are usually caused if Sage crashes and closes down when you are partway through entering a purchase invoice. Or sometimes if the user closes the window down partway through entering the transaction.

If you get the error when generating payments you might need to enable the setting first to allow yourself to view these.

To turn on the setting go to purchase ledger > ledger set up > ledger settings then tick the option to ‘Allow Batch Processing’

Once the setting is enabled go to purchase ledger > enter transactions > batch transactions (manager)

This will open a new window where you will see any invoices which have not fully gone through to the purchase ledger account.

If you have processed some supplier payments using the ‘Generate Payments’ routine, but realised that you have made a mistake then you will have to reverse these payments manually one at a time.

There are several ways to unallocate and reverse payments. Below is one way of doing this and will work for payments made in the base currency.

The first thing you will have to do is remove the suggested payment file, Sage won’t allow you to make amendments to anything while it is part of a suggested payment run.

Make sure you have details of the payments you wish to reverse before going to Purchase ledger > Period End Routines > Payment processing > Delete suggested payments.

You can delete the suggested payment for a single supplier if it is just one supplier you are reversing.

If you are reversing all payments then select ‘Delete all suggested supplier payments’. Then click ‘Delete’

Go to the transaction enquiry screen for that supplier and locate the payment in question.

Remember you will have to untick ‘Show outstanding transactions only’ because the payment will not be outstanding, it will have been automatically allocated to the invoices which it has paid.

Highlight the line and click ‘Correct’

This will open a new window, click ‘Reverse’

Sage will then tell you the transaction need unallocating first. Click ‘Yes’ to unallocate the transaction.

From the allocations window hit ‘Reverse’ again.

Confirm the reverse ‘Debit and Credit’

This will make the allocations value return to zero so the payment and the invoices will go back to the status of outstanding. So then click ‘Save’

This will then take you back to the ‘Correct Supplier Transaction’ screen where you can click ‘Reverse’ again.

This time you will not get the warning about allocations, instead you will be presented with a pre-filled ‘Enter supplier Receipt’ window.

This is presenting a receipt details which are the exact opposite of the payment which has been made.

Double check the details and if required you can enter additional references for the transaction. Click ‘Save’

Close down the correction window by clicking ‘Close’

This will take you back to the supplier transaction enquiry screen. You will see that the payment and receipt have now been allocated off against each other, reversing the payment transaction.

The original invoices will now show back to being outstanding and will appear on the next generate payment report when you run it next.

You will have to repeat this process for each supplier payment you wish to reverse.

Well Exporting and Importing Financial Statement Layouts will make the formats easier to create.

If you have an existing company on your Sage system that has the same nominal structure, you can copy the layouts from that company to the new one. By exporting and importing financial statement layouts you then don’t have to go through the time-consuming effort of recreating them from scratch.

From company with the existing layouts, go to the ‘Financial Statement Layouts’ window pick either profit and loss or balance sheet, highlight the report and click export.

Save the file as a .csv somewhere easy to find.

Go to the sage company that you would like to import them into and back into the ‘Financial Statement Layouts’ window. Pick the sort the you would like to import and click import.

Select the .csv file that you saved earlier, click open.

Click save and close

The imported layout will then be save. I would always recommend then click ‘validate’ as this will check whether there are any nominals missing from the report.

You can then over type the name of the report if you don’t want it to be called ‘Imported Layout’

You can have multiple financial layouts and you get the choice which one to run in the criteria window, so whatever you name it in the above window will appear as a selection here

By setting up the new reports Features/Menu Items, you allow yourself, and others, to access it easily and efficiently.

Follow this week’s Tip of the week for more information.

Save the report on the server in the following file location>

“Server Name” \Sage\reporting\custom\reports\”Company Name”

This makes it easy for you and your support team to find these reports later if any changes need to be made.

As a rule, we recommend that you only save changes to existing reports in the relevant ledger folders within the ‘custom’.

All new reports are best saved in a folder with your company name for ease of access.

Go into Sage System Administration > Features > Right click on the features screen and add new feature.

(Usually in an existing or create a new ‘custom’ folder)

Name the feature whatever you like and press OK

Select the feature – at the bottom of the screen, choose the Targets tab and Add

Choose a name for the Target Action, and change the Target Type to Report, then browse to the new file you have saved.

Right click on the New report and select ‘Role authorisation’. Apply all user roles you wish to be able to have access to this report.

This is now fully set up as a Feature in System Admin. Next, open Sage to create the new report as an option in the menu.

Click the pencil icon at the top of the menu to edit your menu layout.

Select the module you wish to add the report to and click the plus to add a new menu item.

This should give you a list of features to add on to the menu. Select the feature you wish to add and click ok.

You can move the feature up and down as needed with the arrows.

Running balance ledger/Verifying data in Sage 200 is an important aspect of running any business.

When you verify your data in Sage 200 you validate key quantities within the module.

The focus of these checks is the stock quantities and the order/return line values for sales and purchases. To verify your data in Sage 200 Commercials read on!

Go to Accounting system manager > system utilities > verify data > commercials

• Tick ‘Validate, report and correct anomalies’
• Tick ‘Stock Control’
• Then click OK.

You will be warned that the routine might take some time however it should not take more than a few minutes usually so just click ‘Yes’

You will see a process bar while Sage works through the ledgers

Sage will produce an errors log which you can just close. You don’t need to review the information on here, your issue might not show on here although the routine may still have resolved it.

Close the errors log. If you have run this routine to try and fix and error check that it has been resolved and if not report to Smith Cooper Sage Support.

Users can now continue to use Sage as normal.