Ten years running Sage 200 and Line 50 in industry, now as a Chartered Management Accountant. If your month-end won't close, your stock won't tie to the nominal, or the reports don't tell you anything — that's the problem I work on.
Book a 30-minute call →Most "Sage support" is IT support — installation, licensing, servers, upgrades, data repair. If that's what you need, Sage themselves or a Sage business partner is the right call and I'd tell you so.
This is the other kind. The system works fine; the numbers coming out of it don't make sense. That's an accounting problem wearing a software costume, and it needs someone who understands both sides.
The classic. Usually some combination of goods received not invoiced sitting in an accrual nobody reversed, stock issued to WIP without the matching nominal posting, valuation differences between the stock module and the ledger, and adjustments posted straight to the nominal instead of through the module.
The fix is rarely clever. It's running the reconciliation monthly instead of annually, so you're identifying a difference from three weeks ago rather than one that could have arisen in any of eleven periods.
Usually because the routine has grown by accretion — someone left, someone else inherited a checklist, and nobody has asked in five years whether each step is still needed. Month-end should be a sequence, not an ordeal.
Cost centres and departments that made sense when they were set up, and now don't map to how the business is actually run. Reports that need manual Excel work every month because the structure can't produce them directly. This is fixable, but it needs someone who understands what the reports are for.
Work in progress carrying materials but not labour or overhead. Bills of materials that were accurate three price rises ago. Both quietly misstate stock, cost of sales and margin — and both show up as "profit jumps around and I don't know why".
Sage 200 has a genuinely capable reporting layer and most businesses use a fraction of it, exporting to Excel instead and rebuilding the same analysis every month by hand.
Often not, and I'd rather say so than sell you a migration.
If you have stock, bills of materials, project accounting or multiple companies, stay on Sage 200 — Xero handles those things less well, and the migration will cost you capability. If you're a service business on Sage 50 with straightforward requirements, moving may well make sense.
The honest version of that advice depends on what the system is being asked to do. Anyone recommending a migration before asking is selling software, not advice.
Sometimes it's a one-off piece of work — reconcile the stock, rebuild the nominal structure, get month-end running. Sometimes the business then wants the monthly numbers produced properly, which is bookkeeping from £195 + VAT a month and management accounts above it.
Either is fine. Both are quoted before anything starts.
Manufacturers and distributors are where Sage 200 usually lives, which is why it sits alongside the manufacturing service — costing, WIP and margin by line. There's also a plain reference on Sage VAT codes.
Based in Northamptonshire, working across the surrounding counties in person and remotely nationwide.
Thirty minutes on the phone will usually establish whether it's a five-minute answer or a piece of work. No charge either way.
Book a 30-minute call → Or run the free Books Check first