Nothing amazing, but not the worst

I work in Accounts Payable, so I am mainly familiar with the Accounts Payable and Purchasing modules in Sage. We have about 800-900 bills per month, many of which go through a PO process and some that do not. Some of our bills are also posted as fixed assets and so I have a tiny bit of experience with the Fixed Asset module in Sage as well.

Sage is mostly ok but has a few things that I think could be improved upon. First of all, their attachment system for attaching files such as PDFs, emails, Excel sheets, etc. to the transactions is very weird and confusing. What Sage refers to as an "attachment" is different than what most people think of when they think of an attachment. Most people would think of an attachment as a single file, such as PDF, that gets attached to an email in Outlook. This is not the case in Sage. In Sage, attachments are really more like folders in a Windows file system, and each attachment can hold multiple files. Furthermore, using the Duplication feature (which we use a lot) can result in duplicating the attachment across multiple transactions and inadvertently linking many transactions and their files, which can be very bad when a user thinks they are deleting a file from one transaction and not realizing they are deleting that file from ALL transactions that share that same attachment.

There are also issues with conversion from one step of the PO process to the next, and if things are not converted properly, it can cause errors and cause transactions to get stuck in a certain step which can require help from Sage support (who, even then, can not fully get rid of the transaction, but merely close it out).Creating custom reports is not easy as the fields that you want to select in the custom report creation screen are not always named the same as in the module where you normally see them. You have to guess and check a whole lot, and there are 10 options for something like "Vendor Name" under different sections of the report creation screen and only one of them will actually output anything and the rest output a blank column.

When looking back at fixed asset details in an AP transaction, the Asset Class is only shown as a series of random numbers instead of what you originally selected, so it makes it difficult to refer back to previous transactions to see what you did previously.

Sage does not allow you to filter and sort by custom dimensions, and this is a really big flaw. For instance, our transactions have a custom dimension called "Location" (as we have a bunch of different physical locations) and if we have a vendor that we use at all of our locations, it's impossible to filter for only one location if we are looking for an invoice from only a certain location.

Overall, it's not the worst software I've ever used, but certainly could use some improvement.

I'm not sure what sort of automation this question refers to. I know Sage recently added an AP automation option that uses Intelligent Data Capture to capture images of the invoices and import that data directly into Sage, but we don't use that. Not sure what other automation this question refers to.

We have multiple entities but Sage does not offer the capability to filter or sort by entity and doesn't offer a view of which entity a particular transaction is assigned to at a high level. You can only see the entity by drilling down into each transaction. This needs to be improved.