Sage 100

Sage partner webinar for AP Automation: Beanworks currently has about 600 customers in North America, UK, Ireland ""Fully involved"" partners get 25% commission on AP invoice fees. Question about selling around us ignored, which to me means ""any chance we get"". Customers also get charged per payment for anything other than payment by the builtin MasterCard virtual card. Repeated claims during the webinar that ""nobody else does all this"" but it looks very much like AvidXchange capabilities.

Even though Daniel Scott stated that we get no tier credit, he must be mistaken, so that is a plus over any other solutions. My understanding from the Sage 100 Advisory meetings is that this solution costs less than the competitive products. Some may disagree with me, but if I get a reasonable margin, tier credit, the customer pays less and the functionality is comparable, I am going with the Sage solution.

What is the cost of giving Sage a kill switch?

I think this is the key slide. I suspect that a good prospect ticks off at least 3 of these boxes.

One note - if customers write their own checks as they have been doing, there is no charge. The weird thing about this is that manual entry is involved on their end, re the vendor code, invoice number, etc, so I worry about scaling if all Sage 100 customers decided to go for it at once. Not that that's going to happen, but still...

The key is that these are likely ""starts at"" prices. If they want to do anything other than pay invoices with what sounds like a credit card (maybe ACH is free too) sponsored by Beanworks they'll pay more per payment. They didn't get too in-depth on the total price for processing and payment. Until I know those costs I wouldn't waste time bringing this to a customer, sitting through a 2-hour demo and fact-finding conference call and ultimately discovering it was way too $$ for the customer.

I am with Wayne's caution at this point. Why? Well, there is no free lunch/implementation, and they all talked way too fast. And there was lying. Does anybody believe a guarantee of 99.9% scanning accuracy? How about implying that there is no customer support required? We have an Avidxchange customer, and I can assure that customer support is required of the vendor. Explicitly ignoring AvidXchange is a flag, because it is a far larger operation than Beanworks. If I were them, I'd assume that most of my partner audience was familiar with AvidXchange because partners interested in AP Automation already are. Yet they ignored it. AvidXchange is not perfect, but it's a reference point. For Sage 100 it relies on file transfers via VI instead of automatic connections through web services. Avid doesn't have a native solution for handling PO's yet. On the other hand, Avid has a ""vendor portal"" which means that vendors can readily check progress on their invoices. Avid's workflow explicitly permits changing all the defaulted coding on an invoice; this is particularly important if you receive invoices for multiple companies, which a vendor often errs on properly identifying; I asked the question and got no answer. It was not clear to me how the Beanworks customer actually pays the vendors. In Avid your options go from printing all your checks to having your payment list go to Avid to handle however the vendor wants, and you just print the few checks locally that you must (like a post-performance payment to on-site entertainment group). If a customer works it right, they can get a refund on payments that is greater than their processing fees. This was mentioned in the Beanworks presentation, so I assume that doesn't happen. As I understand this application area, the real money is made on the payments side; it is essentially a cash float/fees game. If this is true, we want to be wary of smaller players because they'll lose out in the financial leverage eventually needed. My $.02

Avid does have a PO module now.

And I am not sure I like this trend of ""fire your AP clerk and give the money to MasterCard""...

The answer I am getting from Sage on tier is ""they are giving it away free, and tier would be too much to manage"". Then there is very little motivation to go out of our way to mention this - 25% margin is hardly worth it. When there is no tier, then we can recommend anything else, especially if it is superior, as many of you have said regarding AvidXchange. I don't sell something just because we get tier, but all things being relatively the same, it makes some sense to go for the tier, because that's the game we play with Sage. The reality is Sage management gives upper level tier partners the time of day. It's not right, but it's true. The $500 tier we used to get for each new Sage Payment Solutions customer was a small motivation and would be the same for these other connected services. It doesn't put someone over the top from Gold to Platinum or to Diamond, but it justifies putting the time into recommending/selling the add-on. To really maintain or move up in tier, we need consistent new named sales. I get that, but every little amount helps and should be rewarded. Otherwise, let's have something more like Acumatica (3 levels), forget the complexity of tier, and work for margins only, which would probably be detrimental to Sage in many areas.

These days ANY tier is too much to manage!!! I hate to admit how much of my time is spent chasing my tier now that the client is paying Sage directly for 100c... If the client pays Sage directly but there is no one at Sage that can figure out why you haven't been issued a commission credit, does anyone give a flying leap????

I am perplexed in the benefit of Sage 100c for this. I asked the question - are you marketing this to non Sage 100c customers. Can they get this without being on 100c. My guess the answer is yes. So then what benefit is 100c that sage is promoting? The road map has this as a new feature for 100c.

And the marketing this to the customers seemed really fast. Like we show you this on Thur and we are marketing to customers on Monday with demos on Wed. If they come to Sage first then it is their money and no tier credit. Only if you bring it to them will you get some credit for it.

But didn't the Stepford CEO spend an hour at Summit assuring us Sage was all about partners?

The new term for BPAC started at Summit, and the first Atlanta meeting was supposed to be the first week of August. Too many were on vacation, so that was cancelled. It would have been advantageous to have a 2-hour BPAC meeting to preview AP Automation and its marketing, sales, margin and tier, but nothing. That is an ideal purpose for BPAC. Unfortunately, it's unclear who's running the asylum.

This doesn't give me the warm fuzzies about Beanworks. Looks like they are already stretched thin with pre-sales.