Sage 50cloud (formerly known as Sage 50) and Sage 200cloud (formerly known as Sage 200) are both multi-company products, but both need wraparound services and products to make them a good fit with the typical needs of groups of companies and franchises.  Protronics has many years of experience working with franchises and groups of companies, meeting the challenges peculiar to them.

Group wide reporting

“Out of the box” neither Sage 50cloud nor Sage 200cloud have any group wide reporting.  Consequently we design and implement reports (and where necessary data collection processes) to allow:

• Excel based management report packs – directly linked to Sage data, including consolidation; and for Sage 200 including consolidation of companies with different base currencies
• Consolidated debtors; group cash position; consolidated sales analysis; and others for group financial, sales or performance monitoring purpose – using Excel and other third party reporting software
• Franchisor profit and loss by franchisee
• Franchise wise profit and loss (and other) performance comparison reports

Integrating acquisitions

When new businesses are acquired they often need adding to Sage and existing group reporting, and come with challenges inherent to the acquisition process such as:

• Very tight timescales, as there’s rarely opportunity to plan before the acquisition is finalised
• Limited cooperation from staff in the acquired company and/or the provider of the existing software
• Financial years that aren’t aligned, and a need to report pre and post acquisition
• Variation in what’s been acquired (shares; assets with which assets are acquired potentially being different for each acquisition)

We’ve handled a wide range of acquisitions; we’re used to the time pressures; we’re good at defending the integrity and consistency of data, while understanding that compromise is sometimes needed.  All in all, working with us means one problem is minimised when integrating acquisitions.

Intercompany transactions

We’re not aware of any good technical solution for intercompany transactions using Sage 50cloud, but can assist with procedures and reporting that will make reconciliation and so control easier.

For Sage200cloud we have a module that allows intercompany journals created in Excel to be posted to multiple Sage200cloud companies in a single step.  There is also a third party module that: supports reconciliation of intercompany accounts; allows posting of purchase invoices with analysis across multiple Sage200cloud companies; and has other features to ease the entry of transactions across group companies.

Franchises have a different challenge, which is the trading between the franchisor and franchisee, including where the franchisor and franchisee use different Sage accounts software.  We have experience designing and implementing solutions, including with nuances such as “national accounts”.

Standardisation and procedures

Standardisation and procedures are part of the bedrock for any successful implementation of Sage accounts software, but in practice they are often implicit rather than explicit.  For groups of companies and franchises they are often are, or should be, explicit requirements.  We have experience:

• Designing nominal accounts and other coding, and then migrating existing data to the new scheme
• Introducing procedures and reports that ensure conformance to coding schemes
• Writing and deploying group or franchise wide procedures