Sage CRM is an internet based solution which is designed to bring significant benefits to your organisation. The solution has been configured in a way that makes it is easy to deploy, affordable and full of useful features.

Marketing Teams can benefit hugely from Sage CRM as the system has powerful tools embedded into it which can facilitate the management and tracking of marketing campaigns. Sage CRM provides features which are absolutely essential to maximise your marketing resources and to ensure that your campaigns are targeting the right audience.

 Sage CRM provides marketers with the tools to do this, therefore it eliminates the guesswork, and the power of Sage CRM does not stop here. It has the ability to enable you to build up a detailed account of your customers as your business relationship with them progresses. As you develop a better understanding of the different types of customers you have, Sage CRM then enables you to assign them into groups. Once in groups based on common characteristics, Sage CRM enables you to send out mass marketing emails, alerts and mail mergers to the different groups. You can then generate reports based on the responses and subsequently further segment groups if you need to for future campaigns.

Sage CRM essentially helps you to manage your marketing mix. The system allows you to manage and track every element of your campaign, you can view activities, objectives, leads generated and lead follow up, enabling you to capitalise on your marketing resources.

The availability of the Peachtree by Sage 2009 product line, offers new features and improvements that assist small businesses in the long-term management of their operations through enhanced analysis, reporting and payroll management, real-time alerts, and time and expense tracking.

Highlights include:

1.Cash management tools that improve ability to project cash flow:

Peachtree 2009 expands the product line’s already powerful cash flow analysis capabilities to bring even more critical analysis capabilities to small firms. With the new Cash Manager Tool, small businesses can easily anticipate cash needs by seeing what they have now, and what they should have in the future. They can also run “What If” scenarios to see the impact of certain activities such as addition or elimination of inventory, pricing changes, the addition of staff or other investments on the business, without running actual transactions, and can customize cash flow projections based on historical transactions or other activity. All of those scenarios can be exported to Microsoft® Excel for more in-depth analysis.

2. Multi-year reporting for richer budgeting, trend analysis and more accurate forecasting:

Multi-Year Reporting allows small companies to report on General Ledger and Financial Statement data outside of two open years, allowing them to easily compare budgets and financial results using more comprehensive historical trends.

3. Easier payroll management:

Payroll management is even easier with an improved Payroll Setup Wizard, which walks small businesses through payroll setup and maintenance with a series of simple questions. The expanded payroll also supports many additional benefits, such as multiple retirement and insurance plans, as well as flexible spending accounts and additional state taxes, vacation and sick time tracking, and more secure presentation of employee data. All Peachtree reports now display only the last four digits of Social Security numbers to help prevent identity theft, comply with state laws, and help small businesses get a handle on the potential for fraud within their firms.

4. Real Time Alerts anticipate problems and reduce errors:

With Real Time Alerts, firms receive a warning when they use a non-standard A/P or A/R account on Purchase and Sales Invoices, as well as when they use non-Cash accounts on Receipts and Payments. This alert feature takes the existing Internal Accounting Review feature a step further by warning small businesses as problems occur, so there’s less likelihood of mistakes continuing and causing problems in the long term.

5. Streamlined Time and Expense tracking for professional services firms:

Firms that track time can now set the first day of the work week for weekly timesheets, and to save time, they can also copy timesheets from the previous week, as well as see new Time and Expense Ticket List Views, for better analysis.

Sage (UK) Limited has announced the launch of Sage 200 Project Accounting, a powerful new costing and analysis tool which helps companies to keep their projects on time and budget. Companies that will benefit from this include consultants, financial services, market research agencies, software developers or architects – in fact any business that wants to improve project profits and performance.

Sage 200 Project Accounting is the first module to be introduced from the Sage 200 suite, which provides businesses with integrated software for every part of their business, from accounting and finance through to Payroll and CRM. It has been designed to link seamlessly with the other software within the suite so that there is no need for users to re-key any information.

David Pinches, Head of Product Management and R&D, Sage (UK) Limited Mid-Market Division comments: “This launch follows on from the announcements we made in November at Connections regarding our intention to move away from offering individual products and to reshape our portfolio into suites of integrated business management software.

Benefits of Sage 200 Project Accounting allow businesses to do the following:

• Change the terminology used in the software to suit their needs
• Set up simple or more detailed project structures to suit their business and the way it works
• Track profitability of projects with customised project structures, flexible cost transactions, drill down analysis and accounts integration
• Automate invoicing processes and set up billing schedules to ensure accuracy with flexible billing options, including billing a fixed cost, quantity or by percentage complete on a project
• View sort and filter customisable reports and enquiries to see billings to date, revenue per project, change orders, and other project-related information

ABRA HRMS 8.4 Features:

The new U.S. payroll module includes expanded capabilities, like support for step rates and variable pay plans, to further support the payroll processing needs of U.S.-based businesses and organizations in such specific industries and categories as unions, manufacturing, government, and others. New veteran tracking capabilities help government agencies hiring veterans as federal contractors to comply with new reporting requirements, while new online recruitment functionality can help employers fill open positions more quickly.

 Payroll Processing:

The new Sage Abra Payroll (U.S.) 8.4 module includes:

–  user-controlled HR/payroll data sharing

–  added functionality for accruals, shift differentials, and overtime

    calculations

–  support for variable pay plans, such as sales commissions, draws, and

    piece-rate production

–  support for step rates; and

–  an extended set of pay frequencies.

 Veteran Reporting

Sage Abra HRMS includes new functionality for the tracking of veteran reporting categories to accommodate the required annual reporting for federal contractors on or after December 1,2003. A new VETS-100A form implements certain provisions of the Jobs for Veterans Act (JVA) and raises the VETS-100 reporting threshold from $25,000 to $100,000. Veteran reporting categories were also revised to match JVA changes.

 Online Recruiting

 Sage Abra delivers tightly integrated functionality across HR, payroll, benefits, training, and attendance, with rich reporting and analysis, and a Web workforce portal  with employee self-service, company communications, benefits enrollment, recruitment and more.

The product line features support for multiple databases, with versions 8.x of Sage Abra HRMS supporting Microsoft SQL Server, and versions 7.x of Sage Abra Suite supporting Visual FoxPro. Customers also have the option to run Sage Abra HRMS or SageAbra Suite either as a turn-key hardware/software solution or in a hosted environment.