Happy Holidays from Chips Enterprise Solutions
With the New Year just around the corner, we want to take this opportunity to thank our loyal customers, partners and colleagues for your continued support of Sage Business Managment Software solutions and our services in 2017.
We wish you and your families good health, great joy and an even better business year in 2018!
Our offices will remain open during normal business hours throughout the holiday period with the exception of the official public holidays being the 22 , 25 and 26 December 2017 and the 1 January 2018.
Year End Procedures
For those customers whose yearend is December we have uploaded guides to the Chips website www.chips.co.zw to guide you through the yearend process. Please note that there are differient procedures if you use Branch Accounting and these are also available on the website.
Control Account Reconciliation – One of the key checks to make at yearend is to ensure the control accounts are balancing to the subsidiary ledgers. Sage Evolution 7.20 has a option that assists you with comparing the General Ledger Control Accounts to the subsidiary ledgers for Inventory , Debtors and Creditors. To find this option you would go to – General Ledger | Transactions | Control Account Reconciliation. We have uploaded notes for using this utility to the customer zone on our website under year end procedures.
Bank Reconcilation – The Bank Reconciliation utility allows you to match the entries as processed in your cashbook, per individual bank account, with the physically received bank statement, for the same General Ledger (GL) bank account. We have uploaded notes explaining this process on Sage Evolution to the customer Zone.
Diagnostic Tool – The Diagnostic Tool is a powerful utility that helps you to identify the exact reason for various posting anomalies as observed in the Sage Evolution company, it consists fundamentally out of the System Information- and the Health Checks components. Just some of the typical queries that this utility should be able to assist with are: Identifying the reason for Ledger vs Sub-ledger discrepancies. For example, the total Receivables Control account balance differs with the total Customers Age Analysis as at a specific period end. Validating company setup configurations. Customer and supplier transaction allocations issues. We again have uploaded a document covering this to our website.
Inventory Valuation and Inventory Control account differences – We have uploaded a trouble shooting guide to the website under yearend procedures to help you diagnose why the Inventory Control and the Inventory Valuation may have differences.
Inventory Valuation by Date Utility – Whenever there are any back dated transactions in the company, the Valuation by Date report should rather not be used and the user should make exclusive use of the Valuation by Date Enquiries utility. This is found under Inventory | Enquiries | Valuation By Date. We have uploaded an explanation of this utility to the customer zone on our website.
Vat Control account and Tax Report – We have uploaded an article that help trouble shoot any differences between the VAT Control account and the Tax Report.
Backups – It is important to retain a master backup at Yearend and this should be retained in duplicate on seperate media for at least the statutory period defined in the tax act. We have published backup procedures on the customer zone of our website.
Should you be unable to access any of these documents please email helpline@pastel.co.zw and we shall send them to you by email.
Sage Evolution 7.20.5
The latest version of Sage Evolution is 7.20.5. All Sage Evolution customers who are paid up on their annual renewal are entitled to this at no additional charge.
Customers may download this version themselves from our website under the customer zone – software. Alternately customers may request a CD from our offices.
Customers may carry out upgrade themselves or engage us to assist at our prevailing hourly rates of US$ 55 per hour.
We have also uploaded a list of new features in 7.20.5 to the customer zone.
Sage Evolution Standard now rebranded Sage 100
Sage Evolution Standard has now been rebranded Sage 100. We have uploaded details of the new features and a copy of the latest release of Sage 100 to the customer zone on the website. Sage 100 is now officially released and Sage Evolution Standard users may upgrade to Sage 100. Again you may download yourselves or request us to send a CD.
Sage 200 Evolution
The next major release of Sage Evolution planned for May 2018 is going to be Sage 200 with Sage Evolution being rebranded Sage 200 Evolution.
1. Sage 200 is effectively a rebranding of Sage Evolution by Sage and is not a new product.
2. We are expecting the release of Sage 200 Evolution in May 2018 , we can avail a Beta copy to yourselves when it becomes available for you to review if interested , however this can only be deployed live after official release or with prior permission from Sage.
3. The key enhancements we are looking forward to in Sage 200 are ;
1. General Ledger Attributes – This new feature will enable you to extend the analysis of your general Ledger chart of accounts beyond the current segmentation offered in Sage Evolution.
2. Inventory Attributes – Fixed and Variable. Our clients want to better categorise their stock items without having to maintain a very large list of items.
3. Multiple Bin Locations – Enable our users to track their stock quantity per warehouse, per bin, per lot. Currently, the workaround is to create another warehouse to act as a bin, which results in large datasets.
4. Multiple Barcodes – Pricing Per Unit of Measure and Barcode Per Unit of Measure
5. Strengthen Core Solution – Please refer to Sage 100 release notes , these features will extended into Sage 200 .
6. Bot Integration – (This will be in a phased manner and may not be in first release)
1. Eliminate the pain of admin tasks by simply chatting to record activity and transactions.
2. Stay on top of business transactions on the go with nothing but your favourite messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Slack.
7. Integration with Office 365 – Business owners will not be bound to the office with the capabilities of Microsoft Office 365. This will allow access to their BMS data from a browser.
8. Cloud API enhancements
Thank you again for your support in 2017 and we wish you and you your families a happy Xmas and the very best for 2018. Please do not hesitate to request assistance from our support department on email helpline@pastel.co.zw or 04 773809, 086 77003888
Happy Holidays from Chips Enterprise Solutions
