Sage 100

I continue to have difficulty getting Sage to respond in any meaningful way to my request for Sage Billing and Payment information as it relates to Sage 100 ERP integration. So far I've had two separate instances (about 3 months apart) where I've had to ask Sage for more information. In both cases the farthest I was able to get was a PDF of the capabilities. The promised ""so and so does are demos and will be in touch"" have never materialized. Generally in my personal experience when Sage is this laid back about something it's not ready for prime time. Obviously your results may vary.

Here's the pretty PDF they sent.

we had a users' meeting in October and I begged for anything to show on this and the response I received was basically - ""it's not ready for prime time and still changing..."" - something like that, so I can't say I'm surprised. Bullet points only at this point, no meat yet.

Pretty useless, if you ask me. It'll be making the rounds again at Summit.

During last years summit I did a usability study with it. It has a lot of work, if you ask me. It is really just reading from your data what invoices need to be paid and sends its own invoice to those customers. It will then create the cash receipts for those who pay through the service. It wasn't that intuitive for the interface (you can tell they tried to simplify it for the user). It seemed to me that the focus was on the interface to the user and not the integration. This was probably due to them wanting to integrate it with other systems so they kept it basic. Overall, I think the concept is good. I just didn't like how it was appearing to be implemented. I am sure it has made a lot of changes since then.

Today I talked with Jennifer Schwarz, the product manager. (Jennifer.Schwarz@sage.com, 604.207.3444 ). They claim to be starting the rollout in 3 weeks. They've been testing with a handful of 100/300 customers for a few months. Here is what I got from our talk: 1.Works with Sage 100 ERP 2013 and Sage 300 ERP 2012, and later versions. 2.The email invoice is embedded, and the interface to send it is separate from the current Paperless Office. 3.You can mix and match customers to send invoices from SBP and PLO. 4.If you choose to include a ""Pay Now"" button on the invoice, the customer's CC payment is made through SPS. 5.""Pay Now"" will also present an option to the customer to enter ACH routing/AcctNo information to pay that way. 6.Both Customer CC and ACH info are NOT saved at this time. These data must be entered manually each time for now. 7.You do not yet handle automatic bank ACH draws with SBP; you must invoice for each payment wanted. 8.When the customer makes the payment, that Cash Receipt transaction is automatically downloaded to your Sage 100/300 Cash Receipts batch. 9.There are a handful of Sage 100/300 customers who have been testing this initial version for several months. 10.The price for customer release will be $29.95/mo/customer. There are no per-user or per-transaction fees. 11.The reason Sage requires a CC from Business Partners for this free service is probably just because eventually we would be paying a monthly fee for the service. See a 2-minute video here: youtu.be/5jKvKHC5btU

Also, next week there is a Partner webcast for the launch. 1/21 or 1/23. https://sagena.webex.com/sagena/onstage/g.php?p=5hSsgTbqkpwApcXkeKVWe4Og4EA148CUisipExwOJDODvF3obip&t=m

Since there is no charge for partners using the service for 3 years, we'll probably sign up. Deadline for the deal is 1/31.

I signed up. Haven't received any response yet. But free is free and will give me a chance to play with it before a client asks about it.

Beth, do you already have a SPS account?

Not yet, but I will, hm?

@JerryNorman that's farther than I got. I only got two promises that I would be able to talk to her. My advice - stay away until you have references.