Sage Summit 2013: New Mobile Apps & Intelligence Tools for Small Businesses

“It’s important for Sage to enable our on-premises customers to gain the benefits of the cloud,” continued Langner. “As such, we’ve been steadily advancing our cloud and mobile strategy to provide small and medium-sized businesses with choice and flexibility. We’ve also been making a concerted effort to build connectors between on-premises and the cloud that give businesses freedom to interact with their data anywhere, anytime. These serve to extend and preserve their investments in their existing business processes and knowledge.”

Sage Mobile Sales

An intuitive native iPad application, Sage Mobile Sales provides manufacturers, distributors and retailers with a mobile solution that improves the customer sales experience by giving sales reps all the information needed to make an impression and close bigger sales. This includes anytime, anywhere access to customer order history, product availability and an online product catalog. Through a real-time cloud connection to the Sage ERP data, sales reps can process quotes and orders in the field, take payments and collect signatures using their iPad with the Sage Mobile Sales app.

Sage Mobile Sales allows for:

• An overall improved customer buying experience at customers’ locations.
• Increased sales productivity by giving salespeople the information they need and reducing phone calls to the office.
• Close bigger sales by showing relevant “add-on,” “accessory” and “substitution” products in the moment on their iPad.
• Easy and secure payment collection.
• Get paid faster by offering customer more payment choices, including credit card, on account, and so on.

Sage Mobile Service

Sage Mobile Service allows companies with field service technicians to be more efficient and flexible in the field. With this app, field service reps can schedule work, view completed orders, invoice and analyze from a web portal. Service employees can view detailed information such as customer service histories, work orders and approved estimates on their smartphones, leading to better customer service and higher employee productivity. From their iPhones, they can then update and complete the work order as well as collect payment easily and securely on the spot.

With Sage Mobile Service, businesses can:

• Improve cash-flow with mobile credit card acceptance and customer sign-off.
• Reduce costs and improve customer service with optimized scheduling.
• Help service employees optimize their work day.
• Increases employee productivity by giving them the information they need when and where they need it.
• Produce higher referrals and repeat purchases.
• Reduce customer disputes over service charges.
• Get paid faster and with fewer disputes by giving customer payment choices including credit card, on account, and so on.

Sage Billing and Payment

Designed to provide Sage customers with an easy and cost-effective way to improve the invoicing cycle, Sage Billing and Payment is a new subscription-based service accessed through a web browser that streamlines and automates the accounts receivable process. The service accepts electronic payments, which reduces the time it takes to receive funds, and automates receipt delivery by sending electronic receipts instead of mailing paper ones. It provides customers with an online portal to manage their account and make payments instead of placing calls to customer service or sales. And, by utilizing electronic invoices instead of paper invoices, the app delivers invoices at a much lower cost.

Sage Billing and Payment can help businesses:

• Improve customer satisfaction by offering the option of electronic invoices and payments.
• Decrease the cost of sending out invoices by over 90 percent versus paper invoices.
• Reduce the time and expense of filling and storing paper invoices.
• Reduce days sales outstanding by delivering invoices in two days (versus five to 10 days for paper) and receive payments faster than receiving paper checks.

 

Sage Enterprise Intelligence for Sage ERP X3 and Sage Intelligence Reporting Bundle for Sage 100 ERP, Sage 300 ERP, and Sage 500 ERP join Sage Inventory Advisor(announced in June 2013) to empower small to medium-sized companies to make informed, confident decisions that will help grow their businesses. Sage Inventory Advisor is currently available, while Sage Enterprise Intelligence and Sage Intelligence Reporting Bundle will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013. All three solutions will be previewed at Sage Summit 2013 in Washington, D.C., July 21 – July 26.

“To stay competitive, businesses need ways to increase sales and improve efficiency and profitability. Better, more concise insight into their operations can help inform business leaders with meaningful information to make confident decisions for long-term success,” said Joe Langner, executive vice president and general manager of mid-market solutions, Sage North America. “Our intelligence tools enable businesses to make faster, more accurate course corrections, unveil new opportunities and adapt to the changing market and business landscape with ease and proficiency.”

Sage Enterprise Intelligence

The tight and secure integration of Sage Enterprise Intelligence with Sage ERP X3 ensures data integrity and the reliability of critical business information. Through a partnership with Tangerine Software, Sage Enterprise Intelligence provides business users with extensive self-service BI capabilities in an intuitive web interface. It can be used out of the box in all areas of business, for budget management and control, sales analysis, inventory control and analysis, quality control (purchasing, production, customer service) or productivity analysis. It is designed for business users who value simplicity, elegant graphical analytics and a variety of options to share views in web portals or mobile devices.

“Our agreement with Sage recognizes the customer experience that makes Sage Enterprise Intelligence so unique with a true self-service BI solution that any business user can easily access and use,” states Greg Brown, president of Tangerine Software. “It will bring the full power of BI, mobility and big data processing to Sage mid-market customers. We look forward to working closely with Sage to accelerate innovation for Sage customers, in North America as well as globally.”

Sage Enterprise Intelligence goes beyond spreadsheets and report writers to provide an intuitive, unified view of integrated data from various sources. It enables every business user, executive and manager to create a view of data that is meaningful to their role and to analyze data with complete drill down, drill through and slice and dice analytics that simplify the view and use of business intelligence.

Sage Intelligence Reporting Bundle

Available for Sage 100 ERP, Sage 300 ERP and Sage 500 ERP, the Sage Intelligence Reporting Bundle empowers companies to quickly and easily obtain the information required to improve their operations and reporting across the entire business. With the Bundle, companies can experience more efficiency when designing, preparing and running reports. Its common Microsoft Excel interface makes the solution easy to use.

Sage Intelligence is the more natural and more cost-effective option for Sage ERP users to manipulate real-time ERP data, with the convenience of a familiar, Excel-based interface to quickly slice and dice financial data, analyze risks, adjust forecasts and deliver up-to-the-minute reports using the templates provided. Businesses can connect almost any database for their reporting needs to achieve consolidated and automated reporting.

Included with the Sage Intelligence Reporting Bundle for Sage 100 and 300 ERP is a profitability dashboard that enables businesses to easily identify the profitability of customers, products and salespersons based on weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual segments. This allows them to better manage costs and develop marketing strategies accordingly.

With the profitability dashboard, companies can:

• Meet customer demand by identifying and focusing on high volume products.
• Quickly identify top performing salespeople.
• Make quicker decisions using information from their Sage ERP system.

The Bundle also includes unlimited licenses for report manager, report designer, viewers (to drill down into reports), and connectors (to consolidate reports from any Sage or non-Sage database)