From Sage MAS 500's first general availability release, which I first met in June 1997 (then "Acuity Financials"), I was never terribly impressed with its budgeting capabilities. I found it cumbersome that budgets needed to be maintained GL Account Number by GL Account Number. I also found it less than intuitive that in the Maintain Budget screen, the Fiscal Periods were listed vertically, whereas most people who create budgets in Microsoft Excel, for instance, would place the periods in columns across the page.

Since MAS 500 comes with FRx -- The Financial Report Extender, and since most of my clients were presently creating budgets (if they did so at all) in Microsoft Excel, I simply told them to continue budgeting in Excel and use FRx to link their accounting data "actuals" to their Excel spreadsheets as the "Budget." This they could do seamlessly in most circumstances.

The introduction of Sage's Active Planner was certainly a giant leap forward for those that needed more sophisticated budgeting capabilities and were going to use their budget comparisons or budgetary data as a more proactive mangement tool. However, it had its limitations, as well.

At Sage Insights 2008 I became aware of Budget Maestro from Centage. This product, which was first introduced with MAS 200 in 2004, is now available for MAS 500 and offers some advantages over Active Planner. In particular:

  • Payroll and Benefits Planning as a built-in specialized component means that one need not develop one's own formulas to calculate and "what-if" payroll and benefit scenarios.
  • Revenue Recognition capabilities are included to aid organizations where this is a requirement. While not every organization needs this capability, for those that do, not having to develop your own formulas to approximate or simulate revenue recognition may be a significant benefit.
  • Manufacturing (including Component Costing) would likely be a huge boon for organizations involved in manufacturing. No more wasted time tediously developing formulas in spreadsheets or Active Planner to simulate your manufacturing scenarios.

You may wish to take a look at Active Planner or Budget Maestro is your MAS 500 budgeting requirements are beyond the pale of simple spreadsheets and FRx links.

By the way, if you feel you need a live, direct integration to your General Ledger transactions, CRM (customer relationship management) system, HRIS (human resources information systems) or other ERP subsystems -- and your pocketbook can support the considerably higher price-point -- then Active Planner is still the best fit for you. Budget Maestro uses Excel templates to import data from payroll, CRM, and fixed asset subsystems, and has a direct integration to the General Ledger for balances (but not transactions). (My hat's off to Chris Howard of Centage Corporation for these clarifications, by the way.)

Also, Synergistic Software Solutions has built an extension for MAS 500 that automates the import of Excel spreadsheet data into MAS 500's native budget data schema. Contact Synergistic Software for more information.

-- Richard D. Cushing

Send your comments directly to richard.cushing@synergistic-us.com, if you do not wish to post them here.