Whats-New-in-Sage-Financials-march-2019-Upgrade

Sage Financials: What’s New in Sage Financials March 2019 Upgrade?

In Sage Financials, Sage Live by Tamara

Reading Time: 4 minutes

March has been a big month for Sage Financials, with the announcement that Sage Financials innovation development will shortly come to an end. We know that for customers of Financials this may have been an unsettling time, and so our Product Director took some time out to deliver on a webinar on your future with Financials. Don’t worry if you missed it – you can watch it again here. In the midst of all the planning and preparation for the future, it is easy to forget that March brings a new Sage Financials upgrade and new features. Including improvements to invoices, Making Tax Digital and automatic contract renewals. Let’s take a look.

Disputed invoices

A dispute status has been added to invoices, allowing you to flag any unpaid purchase and sales invoices. Until the dispute has been resolved, the invoice cannot be paid. There are 4 dispute statuses:

  • Active – Unresolved invoice dispute
  • Resolved (credit) – The disputed invoice has been resolved and credit is being given for the full amount
  • Resolved (re-issue) – The disputed invoice has been resolved and the invoice needs to be re-issued (this is not automatic)
  • Closed – There is no longer an active dispute

Single save for transactions in Sage Financials

Navigating between the header and the item lines of a transaction will now be much easier. This is due to being able to save the header and item lines of a transaction at the same time.

Automatic contract renewals

You will be able to set contracts to automatically renew when they’re due to finish. This also includes automatic price decreases and increases as a fixed percentage or from the current price book value.

Fixed assets in Sage Financials

The new fixed assets register to automatically record depreciation and maintain a list of the assets used in your business. You can now create records for your fixed assets, post a disposal journal, post an acquisition journal and post depreciation journals.

Making Tax Digital improvements for Sage Financials

The Making Tax Digital (MTD) VAT reports have been improved, including a detailed VAT report and a report for any adjustments you may have made.
You are also able to manually adjust the figures on your MTD VAT return and attach any files you need to support and explain the reasons for any adjustments you have made.

Multi-currency trial balance report

Your trial balance can now be viewed in multiple currencies. The foreign currency amount posted to each ledger account is shown in the appropriate currency.
Each currency has a column that shows the debit and credit balance as well as the debit and credit base balance. The total column shows the overall balance converted to base currency.

Bulk post transactions and journals

All records linked to multiple journal types or multiple transaction types at once can be posted or unposted. This makes it easier to apply changes to many records at once and saves a lot of time. Any journals or transactions in a closed period can’t be unposted. Two actions have also been added to Journal Types and Transaction Types, Post All and Unpost All.

Improvements to posting rules in Sage Financials

The display of posting rules for journal and transaction types have been improved. They are now displayed in groups which makes it easier to see when they are applied.

Automatically allocate payments and receipts using a scheduled job

You can now automatically allocate payments and receipts using a scheduled job. In order to do this, two feeds need to be set up; one for supplies and one for customers. You can do this by navigating to Configuration and selecting Feeds. Sage has also added a new feed broker, Scheduled Tag Allocations. When the scheduled job runs it uses the new feeds to allocate outstanding invoices and post the allocation journals.

Bank Reconciliation

The bank reconciliation sees some general improvements and fixes including:

  • Automatically assign a tax treatment and tax code to a receipt or payment by configuring two new feed broker rules, one for the tax code and one for tax treatment
  • When a journal is automatically created from a bank feed it now uses the tax treatment set on the supplier or customer tag
  • When the page is refreshed, any filters set on the Matching screen are now retained
  • Foreign currency bank accounts now display the correct currency symbol on the bank statement
  • An error message is shown when an invalid character is used to filter transactions on the bank matching screen
  • A filter by other words option has been added on the bank matching screen to filter your transactions
  • The displayed number of unreconciled items in the new matching screen no longer includes unreconciled items from the previous bank reconciliation process

Other improvements to Sage Financials

  • Templates – When templates have installed successfully there is now a message displayed to let you know
  • Cloning Transactions – When transactions are cloned, the exchange rate is no longer copied. The cloned transaction will use the exchange rate set for the date of the transaction
  • Cash flow report, indirect method (Period +YTD) – This is a new report that includes columns for both period and year. You can access the report from the Key Financials Balances list

Fixes in Sage Financials

The following issues have been fixed:

  • The account health screen in the customer and supplier accounts not displaying the total correctly
  • Partial credit notes were not included in the retrospective aged creditor report
  • An error when cloning journals that have inactive dimensions
  • The URL only worked from within the record when a new custom action for a record was defined calling a URL
  • If there was more than one email address in the CC field, there was an error when emailing transactions
  • After deleting a journal or transaction, there was an error when selecting new directly after
  • When there were a large number of item lines on a contract, sales invoices were not generated
  • If view all was selected, the schedule tab displayed values in base currency and then foreign currency
  • When the journal type was set to require approval, submit for approval action was missing

Conclusion

March sees a whole host of great new features in Sage Financials, features and improvements that see the product move into a good position for the future. Whether you are looking for future options other than Sage Financials or looking to improve your current Financials software we are happy to help. Just reach out to one of our team.

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