Purchase Order Control (POC)
Have more control over your purchase orders in Sage 50 AccountsWe understand that keeping track of your purchasing and budget spend can be a challenge. With multiple people raising multiple Purchase Orders (sometimes incorrectly, sometimes without authorisation, or through an authorisation process that takes too long), you can soon start to lose control when keeping to a tight budget. Ploughing your way through a paper trail of potentially sensitive data to rectify the solution is both time consuming and unproductive, as well as unnecessary.
Key benefits of Purchase Order Control:
- Have greater control over budgeting by assigning spending limits
- Automatic generation of authorisation emails ensuring approval
- Creates an audit trail of who has raised and authorised Purchase Orders
- Restrict user access to Sage 50 Accounts and protect the integrity of your data
- Saves you money by reducing unnecessary spend
Hierarchy structure
Set up multi-level hierarchies so that different teams / users can have different levels of authorisers. If there is no authoriser in a team to give the final approval for a PO, it can be auto-escalated until there is an authoriser, however many levels up that may be.
Spending limits and budgets
Set up individual spending limits for users / teams as well as overall budgets.
Restrictions
Apply restrictions on nominal codes, supplier codes, departments, products, funds, projects and cost codes for individual users or apply to a group policy.
Web App
Raise/Approve POs from anywhere with internet access. You do not need to be in Sage or on the company domain.
Auto-send to supplier
Automatically email the supplier once the PO has been approved and include an internal Bcc if required.
All electronic
POC requests and approvals are done via email, so there is no paper chase or risk of losing documents.
Number of users
Additional Sage users are not required to use POC, for example you can have 50 POC users but only 2 Sage users.
Delivery Management
Receive goods and services online with full updates directly to your Sage 50 package ready for your invoicing. Includes delivery tolerances to ensure your PO always matches your received purchase invoice from the supplier.
Purchase Order Control Customer feedback
Sweeep Kuusakoski Ltd, a £12 million turnover electronic waste recycler in Kent, was looking to improve its internal controls without imposing a paperchase.
The POC add-on from Advantage Services was the solution
"It works brilliantly, we can set individual authorisation limits by a variety of parameters, not just financial limits, and since everything is electronic, all approvals are done online. We raise some 6,000 orders a year and the system has had no problem handling them. The support we have received has been excellent and working with Dan and his team has been a pleasure. Yes there were some issues at the start, but everything was sorted quickly and our users were mostly unaware of the developments going on behind the scenes. The system has now evolved to do more than we currently need and has seamlessly become part of the way we operate. Our auditors have been very impressed."
Jim McDougall, Financial Controller
Purchase Order Control
“Ukie works hard every day to ensure that the UK is the best place in the world to make, sell and play video games. This has made getting purchase orders signed off a much better and seamless process. It links up with Sage which has improved the process of matching invoices"
Katie Davies, Accountant
Why buy from Advantage Services?
We'll help you buy the right software!
Getting the expert advice you need on Sage Accounts from Advantage Services. We've been the leading Sage 50 Accounts partner for Sage every year since 2011, helping customers like you with their Sage queries, ensuring the right software is purchased and advising on any additional modules or add-ons that will be benefitial, to ensure finance teams can operate as efficiently as possible.
We've been a Sage Developer ("Tech Partner") for over 10 years and have a whole catalogue of add-ons we've created for Sage 50 Accounts customers who need more functionality.
Advantage Services provide the UK's best rated Sage Support
All Sage 50 Accounts & Sage 50 Payroll purchases from Advantage Services include support provided by our own in-house support team, giving you the peace of mind that if anything goes wrong we are on hand to help.
99% of our reviews are for our support and training services, and are we proud of our Trustpilot rating. Please click the Trustpilot image to read some of the reviews for yourself.
Our experienced technicians have a friendly, no jargon approach and are ready to guide you through any technical issues you might face. Our trainers teach you the skills you need to use Sage to it full potential, helping you to take control of your business.
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POC FAQs
Is the data encrypted?
Whilst the data is not encrypted, it’s stored in a database which is password-protected and can only be accessed from on the web server i.e. no remote connections are allowed.
Where is the Data held and how is it protected?
Advantage Services works with Visn IT as our Hosting provider. The servers are physically located in the Turing House data centre in Manchester, UK. The data centre has ISO27001 and ISO22301 accreditation. The protocols at the data centre prevent any un-authorised access. The site is physically monitored by guards on site and holds a minimum of 90 days CCTV footage.In terms of access via AS personnel, this is restricted to authorised personnel and further secured via two factor authentication (2FA).
How is data transferred or transmitted?
Our HUB service (windows service) will sit on the server where the Sage data is. This will need to make HTTPS calls to our website so is end-to-end encrypted with TLS.
What's the Back-Up Procedure?
The hosting provider does backups every night and all of the server's hard drives are mirrored so that in the event of a hard drive failure, sites will still be operational.In addition to this, AS also complete regular backups of the system, which are stored on encrypted drives as well as an additional remote copy. The code for the website is under source control and this is also backed up to an encrypted drive with additional remote copies.
Once POC is implemented what would be the implication for WAN traffic?
POC web access requires HTTPS requests from a web browser running on a client PC.
Will the system log User Activity?
Auditing is available in POC. Functions are audited at User and Date level and can be reported on.
GDPR
Contact GDPR@advantageservices.co.uk for anything else you might need on this topic. -
POC System Requirements
Sage Software
POC works with Sage 50 Accounts Professional, version 24 (2018) or higher.
Server
Integrating POC with Sage requires a Hub Manager application to be installed on the machine holding the Sage 50 Accounts data. Assuming this hosting machine meets the system requirements for the version of Sage that is being used, then the POC Hub Manager will also be supported to run on that machine. It is your responsibility to check these requirements. If you need assistance, please contact us.
Email Integration
To send emails, you will need an SMTP server (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, etc.). This is only required for the Auto-backup Monitor, Credit Controller and Purchase Order Control add-on. If using a browser based email client you'll be required to create an App Password via 2FA for it to work correctly.
Users
POC is a web application, accessed via a web browser from any computer or mobile device which has internet access. It will work in all up-to-date web broswers e.g. Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
Sage Remote Access
We do not recommend using our products if you are using Sage Remote Data Access (formerly known as 'Sage Drive'). Please speak to us for advice.
