Sage was dodgy when we grilled them questioned them last year at the annual Sage Insights 2010 reseller conference about the plans for payroll in the upcoming Sage MAS 200 SQL 4.5 re-write. The concerns then (and now) are that non-framework modules (namely Payroll, Job Cost, Work Order, and MRP) will NOT integrate to the new MAS 200 SQL 4.5 release.
We spoke to the product managers who didn’t have much information about what options would be available for payroll users – potentially the most popular of the non-framework MAS90/MAS200 modules.
Potentially the lack of integration to Payroll would have kept some users from being able to adopt MAS 200 SQL (may we suggest that for many of those users that 90 Minds member DSD Business Systems SQL Mirroring is a kick ass solution) . Now Sage has just released information on their new Common Payroll initiative.
Sage is using Accpac SQL as a common payroll module to be shared by several other different SQL ERP packages. By sharing the one Payroll (aka common) module Sage hopes to reduce development time during the busy year end tax season when most states and governments work overtime to release tax changes (not always as quickly as we’d like).
There will be some limitations – and Sage has released a chart that ranks the level of integration on a scale from 1 to 3.
Level 1 = General Ledger (aka journal entry only)
Level 2 = General Ledger, Job Cost, Bank Reconciliation
Level 3 = Tight integration -contains the look and feel of the entire ERP system
Initially look for Common Payroll to roll out to the products identified above. Existing users of payroll will NOT have to switch – this announcement is only for the relatively newer versions — such as MAS 200 SQL 4.5 — which were previously lacking any payroll functionality.
© 2010, Wayne Schulz. All rights reserved.