Aptean Intuitive ERP vs. Sage 500 ERP

If you have a programmer and are willing to let them learn the system and want software to function the way you run your business this may work well. If you do not have a programmer on staff and are willing to change your business to match the software but think in the future you may wish to modify your ERP software this may work out well. If you want something you can modify quickly this is not a good choice. If you do not wish to modify the code nor your business practices an evaluation would be required. It does allow substantial modifications, but there are areas it may not fit with your business so well. It is possible that Intuitive may happen to make the options you require available in the future.

Incentivized

Sage 500 ERP is great for companies with core accounting needs, distributors, and discrete manufacturers. Some areas, such as process manufacturing, would require a companion product from an ISV for the software to be truly functional. Some areas, such as construction or retail apparel, may simply not be well-served.

Incentivized

• Easy to Use
• Low Maintenance
• Flexible and modifiable

Incentivized

• Sage is the one-stop-shop for all of our needs. We're able to control contracts, subcontracts, and field reports from the program.
• Another strength is the ability to database all the information and export it to excel. This makes data-based investigations a breeze.
• The ability for Timberscan to be imported to Sage is a huge help with invoice management. Prior to this it all had to be done manually and slowed the process to an essential halt as there are thousands of invoices per month.

Incentivized

• Documentation. The design of en extensible system works well once you figure it out. Some things can be tricky and time consuming.
• They provide no support for customizations. I can understand not wanting to help write specific custom code, but they refuse to even tell anyone what a method on a base class does unless you pay them $200 an hour.
• Their proprietary design can cause modifications to take longer. If you use one of their forms you can not load it, you must call their launch function and put you code in the "Execute" method. If they were more standardized the documentation issue would not be so bad.

Incentivized

• The biggest concern/complaint of Sage 500 users is speed. Some of the screen take a while to load.
• The user interface needs some refreshing. Screens need to be updated to take advantage of shortcuts and to be more intuitive.

Incentivized

We have a lot invested in this from user education to customizations. It would be hard to justify the cost for changing.

Incentivized

It's too pricey for our size of company.

Incentivized

The online training courses are not up to date. We experienced technical issues with two of the classes.

Incentivized

Keep your database and application in different servers.
Install Microsoft Office on your application server so you can use some of the data analysis tools in Sage.

Incentivized

We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective

Incentivized

500 seems much smoother at handling some of the basic accounting tasks, for example both issuing and later reconciling checks in Dynamics AX seems a little tedious.

Incentivized

• Runs well without a ton of support
• One server license required for site, can run several businesses
• Concurrent licensing keeps costs down for global business

Incentivized

• Positive: The program allows for a lot of data entry and splitting of information. It has the capability of replacing multiple programs and therefore saving cost.
• Negative: The modules are cumbersome and not user friendly at all. As a result not many user are comfortable using it. This means that the program is not being used to its capacity.
• Negative: Although the program has the capacity to be great, the user interface destroys that potential. Sage needs to seriously work on their program to simplify it. It's as if it still uses Command-line entries from 1995. Needs to be updated ASAP.

Incentivized