Many small and medium-sized businesses start with Sage 50 to manage their finance and accounting needs. For many companies, this financial system continues to satisfy their needs even as they grow.  However, as your business grows and evolves your Sage 50 system may not be able to keep up with your new requirements.

5 key reasons why you should consider migrating from Sage 50 to Sage X3

Below are some of the reasons why Sage 50 customers have migrated to a new Sage X3 ERP system:

1.     Managing more than one entity

Sage 50 has multi-company capabilities however they are each held separate from one another. This means that your multi-entity consolidations can take hours to days, significantly delaying your month-end each time.

Key sign: You’re spending too much time on month-end. Key information is delayed hampering decisions and potentially leading to missed business opportunities as a result.

2.     Issues with data

You haven’t got access to real-time data, reports are mainly in spreadsheets and you don’t have access to stock, manufacturing or supply chain data.

Key sign: Before making an informed strategic decision, you must consolidate data into spreadsheets. This takes up valuable time that could be spent on analysing the data to make decisions quicker.

3.     Too many systems that don’t talk to each other

Sage 50 is primarily an accounting system, so it manages your financial processes well but has limited production and inventory functionality. If your company manufactures, distributes or provides services, the systems that manage those business processes are probably not integrated. When those systems can’t communicate, integrations are replaced by manual workarounds.

Key sign: You can’t get a comprehensive real-time overview of the state of your entire business. Not having the full picture means you are making decisions on inaccurate data that could negatively influence decision-making.

4.     Manual processes taking too long

It’s easy for inefficient processes that seem to work when you’re just starting to gradually become ‘standard operating procedure’, even though they are unable to scale. This may result in the need to hire additional employees as the business grows to cope with those inefficient processes.

Key sign: Manual processes have become standard operating procedures – and as you try to grow, the processes themselves are a bottleneck. Inefficient processes hinder and slow progress, can be error-prone and prevent businesses from reaching their goals.

5.     Scalability

Sage 50 was designed to be used by either one person or a very small number of people, so it doesn’t allow you to grow your team, manage multiple entities or easily manage international processes. If your company is growing organically or through acquisition, there comes a point whereby you will have outgrown Sage 50.

Key sign: Sage 50 cannot keep up with your company’s growth.  As a company starts to expand its ERP system needs to grow with it. E.g., is the ERP system operating in multi-currency, multi-legislation, multi-company, multi-ledger and multi-site?

If any of the above signs resonate with you, then perhaps it’s time to start looking at the next Sage platform that will keep up with growth. If your business is growing and you are looking for a fully integrated business management solution that manages every department and process across your business including finance, stock/inventory, production, sales and service, then an Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) system like Sage X3 could be the answer.

What are the benefits of migrating to Sage X3?

Sage X3 is Sage’s flagship ERP system, offering the functionality that will allow you to manage current and future growth. The system is highly configurable and offers industry-specific functionality – from finance and distribution to manufacturing and supply chain. It can be deployed not just on-premises but also in the cloud.

Some of the key benefits are:

  • Fully featured – Sage X3 is a fully featured ERP system: designed from the ground up to provide a comprehensive, integrated solution for every department and process across your business including finance, stock/inventory, production, sales and service.
  • Fully scalable – a flexible system that will grow with your company.
  • An accurate view of business data – by using one solution for all your data you minimise the room for error and save time by eliminating manual consolidation.
  • Real-time control – complete control, visibility and interaction across the whole business and its processes.
  • Multi-everything – multi-company, multi-site, multi-location, multi-currency, multi-ledger, multi-legislation, allowing you to save hours of manual processing.
  • Integration with other business-critical systems – Sage X3 can be integrated with other business-critical systems, extending the functionality and still giving you a single version of the truth.
  • Access anywhere, anytime from any device – having access to real-time data wherever you are on any mobile device or tablet.

Sage X3 is particularly suited to companies in the manufacturing, distribution and services sectors, helping organisations in these sectors to deliver value to their customers.

Migrating from Sage 50 to Sage X3 with Inixion

Sage 50 is primarily an accounting system, whilst Sage X3 is a fully-fledged ERP system, so there is no direct migration or upgrade path. This means that you will have to treat the migration from Sage 50 to Sage X3 as a new ERP implementation.

It is a big step from Sage 50 to Sage X3, so it is crucial to select a partner who can help you through the process. Inixion has a depth of experience across different industries, including manufacturing, distribution and services. Over the years we’ve helped many customers migrate from smaller systems including Sage 50 as they grow and discover that the system no longer delivers the reporting, analytics and collaborative view of the business that you need to continue growing.

As one of our customers who moved from Sage 50 to Sage X3; Alan Ockendon, CEO at TXO systems put it:

“Sage X3 offered the best range of out-of-the-box functionality for TXO Systems yet providing a platform for specific requirements to be developed. Sage X3 will provide a fully integrated solution for TXO Systems and our expanding international presence now, and into the future.”

Partnership approach

We will work in partnership with you to ensure that we understand how you currently manage your business processes and which business-critical systems may need to be included in the migration to Sage X3. We then translate that into how Sage X3 can manage these processes; an ideal opportunity to look for new productivity gains and efficiencies.

Access our comprehensive ERP selection checklist, which highlights three critical categories for consideration and has been created to help guide you in selecting the right ERP system with the right functionality.

Alternatively, get in touch with us today to discuss migrating from Sage 50 to Sage X3.