In the last issue of our newsletter, we began our coverage of the upcoming 7.3 release of Sage MAS 500 ERP. It is a substantial release, with dozens of new features and advanced functionality. In this article, we continue our coverage of this release, which has an anticipated release date of late 2009.

ACH Electronic Funds Transfer

Version 7.3 adds an ACH feature to the Accounts Payable module. The ACH feature gives you the ability to process payments using electronic funds transfer technology through the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network. The ACH Network is a highly reliable and efficient nationwide batch-oriented electronic funds transfer system that utilizes depository financial institutions. The Federal Reserve and Electronic Payments Network function as central clearing facilities, through which financial institutions transmit or receive ACH entries.

The ACH feature works within the Accounts Payable module, extracting check information and creating a file as you process invoices for payment. Instead of printing and mailing a check, your vendors are paid electronically through the secure ACH system. Your organization can experience lower transaction costs than with printing and mailing checks, speed payment processing, and optimize your cash flow.

Positive Pay

In Version 7.3, the ability to perform Positive Pay is built in to the Accounts Payable module. Positive Pay is a fraud prevention method that has gained a good reputation for helping prevent fraudulent checks from being processed.

When payments are registered and posted through either Sage MAS 500 AP Process Invoices for Payment or Process Manual Checks, a Positive Pay file is created. The file contains information such as check number, date, amount, and payee. When a check is presented at your bank for payment, the bank will only honor it if the Positive Pay transmission matches the payment details.

Inventory Enhancements

In Version 7.3, the Inventory Physical Count process has been enhanced with significant workflow and user interface improvements to make the count process fast, efficient, and accurate.

The Enter Counts screen contains an easy-to-use grid entry that you can use to enter counts (using stock unit of measure). Powerful filter criteria empower you to target count items to display, and allow you to select uncounted items, counted items, or both. Expanded item selection criteria and sort order control add flexibility, and you also can select individual list items to count. You can save time by automatically setting uncounted items to zero. You also will have the ability to delete frozen controls from a batch. Plus, now you can save your count selection settings for future use. A new detailed transaction report is available, as is a history table for audits.

If you wish to enter counts in Microsoft Excel, you can select items in Sage MAS 500, export the data to Excel, and then fill in the count quantity. Then use DataPorter to import the counts back into Sage MAS 500.

In addition, the Recalculate Inventory Quantities utility now can be run on demand.

Business Insights Explorer

Views Several new Business Insights Explorer (BIE)
views are added to allow you to view pending
and posted inventory transactions. Use the
new capability during Sales Order Entry.
For example, to drill down into pending
inventory transactions, right down to the line
item detail, to uncover unposted shipments
that reference the item in question.

The following views are available:

• Pending Decrease Transactions
• Pending Physical Counts
• Posted Physical Counts
• Pending Lots (Preview)
• Pending Serial Numbers (Preview)





Sales Order Enhancements

Previously, shipments had to be committed before an invoice could be printed. The shipment commit process in Sales Order has been enhanced in Version 7.3 to enable you to print a pro-forma invoice before committing the shipment. This way you can include a printed invoice in a shipment, or quickly print an invoice to give to the customer for counter sales.

In addition:



• The Edit Shipments task is enhanced with a new Invoiced status and the ability to generate, print, and view invoice details for a selected shipment.
  
• You can delete pending invoices before committing shipments.
  
• New security events control the ability to generate and delete pro-forma invoices prior to commit.
  
• You can enter and apply payments in the Process Sales Order and Edit Shipments tasks.
  
• New Ready To Commit and Shipment Status selection criteria have been added to the Select Customer Shipment task, allowing you to postpone commit processing until after business hours.
  
• Significant performance improvements are added to the Sales Order Commit and Edit Shipment tasks.
  
• A new setting to optionally bypass commit validations when editing and saving shipments is added. This allows you to optimize performance before the final commit.