Sage 100 Stability is Important for Your Business
We've been working with Sage 100 in various forms since 1990. Back then it was MAS90 by “State of the Art” software (Sage under a different name). Since the original Sage 100 package was released in the 1990’s, there has been a consistent cycle of development and — most importantly — Sage has reacted quickly to things that are not working correctly and issued fixes.
As an employee of a company who uses Sage 100, you have been following the same general process since the earliest releases. Inventory, sales orders, purchase orders, receivables, payables, and the general ledger have all maintained the same level of functionality which has been easy for Sage to do since these are relatively standard needs across industries. While the little bells and whistles in between versions are a bit different, Sage has maintained the same process and workflow steps since the 1990s. That tends to make for happy employees who have to use the software every day.
What we find to be most stable about Sage 100 over the years is that nothing really falls through the cracks. For example, you don't really get unbalanced journal entries. Or things coming out of inventory without a very solid audit trail to go back to the transaction to see why. You've got purchase order history and sales order history which can both be archived for as many years as you want. With this solid technology base and the process flow that has stayed the same over the years, they tend to make for happy employees who have to use the software every day.
From a technology perspective, Sage has been able to migrate functionality all the way up the technology stack as consumer and business preferences change (DOS, early versions of Windows, web-based versions, and so on). Our co-founder, Doug Clark, was a Sage reseller and master developer from 1990 to 2003. He walked away from the software industry for 12 years to become a CFO. When he came back, other than the rebranding from MAS90 to Sage 100, it was all the same processes that he remembered. He immediately felt right at home after a long gap. Enter a sales order, create a pick slip, generate an invoice, create the receivable, collect the cash, and post the transaction. Easy! All of this makes for a simple and painless training process for employees. Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, and so on — without worry that something will *drastically* change overnight. And that makes for happy employees who have to use the software every day.
What has been great about the Sage community over the years is that many of the third party developers who were creating add-ons for the platform in the 1990’s are still at it today. They are the same companies and have up-leveled their technology skills along with Sage. For example, if you take advantage of e-commerce, there are companies out there like CIMcloud who manage e-commerce transactions and bring them straight back into Sage without any human interaction. The Sage ecosystem developers have been able to stay current with the bells and whistles that we need out here in the business world and the Sage 100 has been solid as a rock all these years.