Sage 100

I have been looking for but cannot find some type of document that provides guidelines for how many users you recommend a system can handle. This would tell us when you would recommend Sage 100 Standard or Sage 100 Advanced. It would also be nice if it included numbers of transactions, dollar amounts and any other pertinent criteria. Full disclosure - I just posted a similar question on Sage City by way of responding to a similar post that was a few years old. I also understand that this may have been posted here previously, but I could not find it if it was. Thanks.

I would be interested in seeing such a document as well. I've always told customers that there's generally no hard and fast rule. Use Sage 100 Standard until such a point as things are noticeably slower. Don't overspend because the migration to Advanced is relatively painless. The metric that I've always used is reporting / posting speed. That seems to get the biggest boost from moving to Advanced. When pressed for a number I'd generally go with 20 and under for Standard although I heard all sorts of numbers from customers and orphans. Some have been recommended Advanced for as few as 10 user sites.

A lot of it depends on the condition of their network. I have a customer with 18 users, JobOps, CRM and history back to the 1990s and Standard is working great. They have competent IT help, refresh their desktops and servers regularly, and keep on top of any issues that come up with cabling and switches.

We used to recommend Standard up to the 10-15 user range and Advanced when into the 15-20 user range (and I think we did find that in a Sage document somewhere - or we pushed for an official response from Sage and received it). Now, with there being no price difference for new sales, we would almost always just tell them to get on Advanced, unless in the 1-5 user range or for other specific circumstances.

We typically go with 10-15 as well. This is also because we are now offering Sage 100 Standard in a single server deployment in our cloud to save cost and offer a lower price point. If the customer has other functionality that slows down the server we limit to 10 or switch to advanced in the 2 server deployment mode.

Any new customers that are more than 1-3 users I always specify Advanced, since the price is the same. Why deal with a large upgrade fee later? For existing users, I start talking to them about this when they get past 8 users, due to a lower upgrade cost. If they get to 15 users or more it can be substantial and harder to sell. Pricing also depends on if they started on user based bundled pricing. We have an inherited client with 30 users currently that is on Standard. I asked the Controller if she thought the system was slow, and she acted like she never noticed, thinking that was the way the software worked. Their previous reseller (a very large reseller) thinks Advanced is slower and a waste of money.

Thanks Guys, all great stuff and greatly appreciated. Unfortunately no documentation seems to be around, which is too bad. I'll try again in whatever has taken the place of the old Partner File Center. But the ideas here have been very helpful. If I may keep going on this theme with a slight variation - what about user limits before you would go from Advanced to Premium (if there is such a thing)? Or, for larger systems, when do you recommend X3 over Sage 100 (assuming 500 is a dead product)? Thanks again and also in advance.

There are 3 major reasons for upgrading to Premium: 1) There are other SQL systems that require integration with Sage 100, 2) The volumes of transaction files are too much for the ProvideX structures (we encounter this in the fruit and vegetable distribution/production industries where we must track lot numbers), and 3) This is a corporate standard or IT will not accept anything other than SQL.

I would recommend X3 if I want to earn Brownie points from Sage management.

Seriously, once you are at Sage 100 Premium, the reason for going to X3 would be based on needed functionality or multi-language, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction. By the way, process manufacturing is not a good reason, since Batchmaster is probably a better choice and it integrates with Sage 100.

Cullen while you're looking for the whitepaper on when to use Standard/Advanced/Premium also look around for a whitepaper which explains the system requirements for an outgoing email service for Paperless Office. It's baffled me that such a document apparently never existed.

@WayneSchulz - here's something we ran into twice over the last few weeks - outgoing email settings with Exchange. Of course, I don't think you'll find this anywhere - just had to bump into the right Sage support person after weeks of troubleshooting.