Aptean Made2Manage ERP vs. Sage 500 ERP

It is good in manufacturing. It helps with planning and scheduling. Also, employees can clock on and off jobs simply to see what each job actually entails in regards to time, quantity and dollars. Shipping and receiving also utilize multiple functions inside of M2M heavily. I think it is less suited for anything outside of manufacturing.

Incentivized

Sage is wonderful for payroll and employee management. Although it has the capabilities to be a one-stop-shop program, it seriously lacks the interface necessary for wide use. I've had to consult Sage professionals on numerous occasions to explain and walk me through the program as there are so many redundancies. This program has wonderful potential, but they need to update the software and user interface before I can recommend it to any colleague.

Incentivized

• Order tracking
• Customer database
• Report printing

Incentivized

• Payables and receivables handled beautifully
• Projects has the reporting capabilities we need
• Cash management is easy to do

Incentivized

• Their support has drastically gone downhill over the last few years. For the amount of money paid for the support of their product, there should be no outsourced tech support, however, they have started doing that lately.
• The development team has no idea how to test a product or release patches in an effective manner. Our last major upgrade was not until the 12th revision of the software and there were still major flaws on the financial end. When I called them about it, they stated that they knew of the issue but had no plans for a fix until the next version release.
• There has been more than one occasion where I have informed them of a way to resolve an issue that should've already know about.

Incentivized

• The application is very functional, but the interface is a little "stale" compared to more modern applications.
• The underlying client software is written in an old version of Microsoft Visual Basic. I suppose SOME DAY, Microsoft will be discontinuing, although Microsoft has its own ERP software written in that same code.

Incentivized

I am not in the decision making group any more for this product. When I was, I along with many other managers, voted to go with a competitive product software vs re-subscribing to Aptean for this product. We were convinced by certain parties at our work that the new product was head and shoulders above the old product. While they freshened up a few things and there was an increase in some functionality areas, it was still tired.

Incentivized

We will renew our investment in Sage 500, mostly because the competition is very expensive and are bloated with options that are not needed.

Incentivized

This software is not user-friendly nor easy to train on. I train people for various departments and had argued for the company to go with another company. I was not alone. When the time came for us to do an upgrade (necessitated by the advent of Windows 10 compatibility issues), a number of managers at our organization wanted to seek out other vendors due to the difficulty in training people to use the software. Then have to deal with so many of the user issues and lack of functionality created by the need for using an outside software programmer to bring in software that interpreted what M2M was doing and then translate it back into the program so that we had an end-user solution. This software should be robust enough to do it all. It is not. I hate to be so negative about it but anyone that has spent as many years using this software as I have should find something good to say about the platform and I struggle to do that. I had asked for the warranty section that would tie into the return authorization process. I was told it would happen. It didn't. Bad karma.

Incentivized

I have been using Intacct for almost 10 years in 2 different companies and I just simply love it. I tried SAP (GUI) and Netsuite and they dont come close to what Ive seen.

Incentivized

I go back to the warranty segment of the program to help track expenses that were generated by returns and zero-dollar sales orders to resolve customer issues. I feel like I was lied to by the company. They said they would have it in there on the new release. They told the purchasing manager it would be on the new release. The purchasing manager assured me it would be on there. They even showed 'warranty loading' on the screen when you signed in. However, there was no additional component of the return material authorization process for warranty adaptation. I even challenged our upload team about it and they had no answer. It does a few functions well but in my personal experience, buy something else.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The actual implementation was no worse or better than other software updates. There were days of pain and additional training helped overcome a lot of the learning curve associated with that. However, that training came from our own internal staff vs anyone from Aptean.

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 haven't compared any yet but hopefully, we will in the next couple years so we can put a figure on what it will cost us to move away from Made2Manage.

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

• I came on board after M2M was implemented so I'm not sure how it has changed from previous software. However, I do know it has the ability to grow with the company.

Incentivized

• Efficiency - enhanced automation
• Cost reduction - simple workspace is enough

Incentivized