Sage: Fact vs Fiction

At the CFMA annual conference, Glen West from Sage provided some very clear updates on these products during the Sage lunch presentation. We welcome his transparency and wanted to share what he said.

We’ve found vendors, other Sage Business Partners, and anyone who loves to share their opinion have been mis-stating the status of these products, so beware when engaging with others. More than one company said they were ‘very upset’ because they had been told by a Sage representative that their product was sunsetting and they had to move to Intacct, and they are NOT happy.

The easy one first. Sage 300CRE (the old Timberline) is NOT going away. They have a very large install base for this product, and they do not have any intention of sunsetting the product. However, they warned that due to the older nature of the code, new features will be very limited and may take longer to release. They are committed to the SCM integration, as well as ADP, and Sage Copilot.

When the cost of support came up, Glen re-stated that the older code is more difficult to maintain, so they do not expect these costs to go down.

Sage Intacct Construction continues to be built and features added. This is the long-time Intacct product which Sage chose as the platform to build a Construction edition (additional fee). This is a fully SaaS-based software (you log in through a browser). We were given a long list of integration partners including Penta for payroll, Zone 220 for Property Management, Operix for work orders and service, with hooks now available to Lumber, Miter, Criterion, Workforce Go, and ADP. They will continue the model of having outside third-party products (that you buy) for specific modules.

Sage Construction Management, SCM, their newest purchase for project management, was also discussed. We co-hosted a demo of this last summer. This is an integrated add-on for Project Managers, again, SaaS-based so they don’t have to log into the accounting software. This is to provide an option for those using ProCore, since this is a lower price point. As we learned in the demo, this is a complete workflow change since many of the project management and accounting steps are done in SCM which is then available to be viewed for financials in the integrated Sage product.

Let’s move to Sage Estimating. A few of the original Sage team had left Sage to develop their own web-based estimating software. They are now back with Sage and Sage has purchased their web-based product, making it the future direction of their estimating offerings. We’ll watch and see how this unfolds and what happens to the current install base in the coming months and years.

Now let’s talk about Sage 100 Contractor, S100C. Glen was very clear that this product is not going away either. They are committed to platform enhancements, continued and expanded integration with SCM, they have a targeted integration with ADP (?), enhanced support for third party integration efforts, and Sage Copilot.

The unexpected announcement was their goal of a SaaS-based version that you would access from a browser. It’s unclear if it would include all features, how third-party applications will interface, and a myriad of other questions! Glen was forthcoming that this would only be for new subscriptions and they are not sure what it would look like for current users to migrate to the fully cloud version. There are many downstream concerns as we think about current integrations, reports, and more. Since we are Sage Business Partners, as well as Sage Third Party Developers, we expect to receive updates in the coming months. – CMW