Sage (UK) Limited: Business software and services

• Merchandise hierarchy reflects the way your products are structured across your business. You have the flexibility to structure a product that has variants associated with it, such as size, colour and style.
• Product grouping
  Products can be grouped for flexibility across a matrix, in line with your business. 
• Multi-branch control
  Define the physical make up of your company - regions, areas, stores and warehouses, using the company hierarchy.
• Batch allocation and despatch 
  Update by complete ranges, such as department or supplier.
• Multiple pricing and promotional control
  Apply promotional offers and price changes by branch or company wide.
• Company-wide promotionscan be set up and managed centrally. Your customers experience consistency across your branch network, and stock turnover is increased.

1. Company head office
2. Company warehouse(s)
   Company stores
3. Names warehouse(s)
   Stores by region
4. Stores by area
5. Named stores.

This defines each store location, enabling stock levels to be replenished by easily allocating and distributing products. Each company hierarchy can view:

• Contact details
• Store details
• PoS terminals details
• Employees
• Any attachments and memos

Merchandise hierarchy
This works in a similar manner to the company hierarchy and can be produced to match the way your products are structured across your company. So your products could, for example, be set up with the following hierarchy:

1. Company head office
 2. Company products
  3. Company departments
   4. Company sub-departments
    5. Company product groups
     6. Company sub-groups
      7. Company stock items

At ‘Stock item’ levels, in-built ‘Product Matrix’ technology can be utilised, offering the flexibility to structure a product that has ‘variants’ associated to it, such as size-colour-style. We call these ‘Dimensions.’ The products can be grouped flexibly across a matrix, depending on what suits you best, such as:

• Dimensions - colour, size, brand, etc.
• Dimension Sets - Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring.
• Dimensions Breakup - colour ranges: red, blue, black, etc.

Stock information for all merchandise can be viewed, amended and analysed for:

• Item details.
• Suppliers.
• Alternatives.
• Locations.
• Prices.
• Bar codes.
• Attachments and memos.

Promotions management
This enables you to increase stock turnover with special offers such as ‘3 for 2’ and ‘buy one get one free’. Customers expect consistency across a network of branches for the same company, so Sage MMS Retail Edition supports this with company wide promotions that can be set up centrally.

Nominated buyers can be assigned to any given promotion and different reward types can be offered, such as a discount, within a defined time line.

Purchase orders
Setting up and processing purchase orders is made as easy as possible, providing all the information needed so you can quickly and accurately replenish stock wherever it’s needed. You can simply drag and drop items into a purchase order from the merchandise hierarchy that you’ve defined. If you have set parameters such as a rule dictating that even quantities of a certain range should be replenished, then this can be accounted for too. Entering a total quantity of any item would split this quantity evenly across the product variant range.

Sales orders
Sales orders can be processed in exactly the same manner. The drag and drop facility is particularly popular in telesales environments when speed of processing is important because customers should not be expected to be kept waiting whilst requesting a list of items they want. The systems also accounts for multiple currencies if trading with companies or customers abroad. As you would expect, all existing quantities of stock are on hand at any given time.

Allocations and despatch
Allocations and despatches can be controlled between warehouses and stores, as your hierarchy dictates. Once the stock has been allocated, the system will print picking lists for each store and despatch notes can then be produced. A very simple process which ensures total control over stock movements.

Budgetary control
A key strength of Sage 200 Retail and Wholesale is its advanced budgetary control plus its ability to analyse the performance of cost centres and departments across your business. Analysis of budgets versus actuals can be viewed graphically, with the option of displaying up to five years of historical data, and the coming year’s budgets. By drilling down to the individual transactions you can easily see the detail behind those trends.

Support is also provided for the consolidation of multiple companies, including those with different operating currencies.

Analysis tools
Throughout the system, custom analysis codes allow you to ‘slice and dice’ information any way you want. For example, you may choose to categorise your customers by region, sales person and account type, so you can analyse sales performance across these categories.

Report designer
Sage 200 Retail and Wholesale is supplied with over 250 ready-made reports covering all aspects of the system, plus a wide range of documents such as credit letters and invoice layouts for everyday use in your business.

You can easily customise these reports and documents or add new ones from scratch. New fields can be added using a wizard; you can add fields which calculate values ‘on the fly’, based on custom formulae. Logos and other graphics can easily be added to customise your reports and documents.

When you run a report, a powerful filter helps you select the information to be retrieved. This includes any appropriate custom analysis codes. For example, you could run a sales report based on a particular region or sales person. You can save particular ‘views’ for future use, and frequently used reports can be added to the Sage MMS menu for easy access.

Reports and other documents can be previewed, e-mailed, printed directly or sent to a print manager for printing at a convenient time. Access rights for the print manager can be set to ensure that sensitive documents are not accessed inappropriately.

Sales enquiries
Sage 200 Retail and Wholesale lets you take this reporting one step further. You can run sales reports across all the detail within the company and merchandise hierarchy. So you can compare sales by region, area or store, and by the departments and products within these. So if an electrical retailer wants to know how many Sony Model XYZ DVD Players were sold last week, they have the answer in moments.

Drill downs
Throughout the Sage 200 Suite, key business information is readily available. Intelligent drill downs allow you to view detailed information, to transaction level if required. Additionally you can drill across to view all related information. For example, you can view the nominal ledger as a Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, drilling down to view nominal accounts and all related transactions.

Excel integration
A library of Microsoft® Excel functions is supplied to allow information to be pulled from Sage 200 into Excel for analysis. Sample spreadsheets are supplied for Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Key Performance Indicators. It is easy to amend these or create new spreadsheets to suit your own business.