The BCN Podcast

ERP & Sage Solutions

• BCN

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Navigating the complex landscape of financial management and operational control is a challenge for any growing business. What if there was a way to scale your systems seamlessly alongside your expansion? 

In this engaging conversation, BCN's SAGE experts Eirini Katsampa, Darren Anguige, and Colin Leyland pull back the curtain on how SAGE 200 transforms business management for growing companies. Unlike basic accounting software, SAGE 200 offers a comprehensive ERP solution that brings financial and commercial operations into one powerful, secure platform built on Microsoft SQL infrastructure. The modular design allows businesses to start with essential financial components and progressively add capabilities—from manufacturing and CRM to project accounting and advanced reporting—as their needs evolve.

What truly sets this solution apart is its remarkable flexibility. Whether you prefer on-premise deployment, cloud hosting, or a hybrid approach, SAGE 200 adapts to your strategic IT direction rather than forcing your business to conform to software limitations. When implemented through BCN's client-first methodology, companies benefit from a partner that understands real-world business challenges and configures solutions to address industry-specific requirements. Their team's approach goes beyond installation, encompassing thorough discovery, strategic configuration, data migration, comprehensive training, and ongoing support.

Technology constantly evolves, and staying current provides competitive advantage. Ready to transform how your business handles finance and operations? Listen to the full episode to learn more.

Eirini Katsampa:

Welcome everyone to today's episode, where we'll be exploring SAGE solutions at BCN. I'm Irini Katsamba, the head of ERP solution at BCN, leading both Business Central and SAGE ERP solutions. In our latest podcast we discussed Business Central solutions as one of our offerings within our B department, and today we're looking at SAITs and how it can help businesses. So if you're a growing business looking to better manage your finance, operations and decision making, sait might be exactly what you need. Today I'm joined by Darren, who leads our SAITs practice at BCN. Darren, would you like to introduce yourself?

Darren Anguige:

Well, hello, my name is Darren Angwich. I've worked for BCN for almost eight years now, working with Sage and Sage products, as well as leading the team on support and other projects.

Eirini Katsampa:

Thank you, darren. We also have Colin with us, our Sage business development manager.

Colin Leyland:

Hi, I'm Colin Leyland. I'm the Business Development Manager here at BCN, as you just heard, and I've been working with Sage products for around about 30 years.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great. Thank you both. Together we will walk through what Sage offers, why Sage 200 in particular starts out and why partnering with BCN can set your business up for lasting success. Partnering with PCN can set your business up for lasting success. Darren, when you look at today's businesses, what are some of the biggest challenges you see companies facing when it comes to managing their finance and operations?

Darren Anguige:

Thank you, Irina. One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is managing growth while maintaining visibility and control over their operations as well. As companies expand, their financial and their operational processes often become more complex, as we know, and disconnecting systems or manual processes start to slow them down, and so there's a real need for real-time insights, better decision-making and technology that scales along with them.

Eirini Katsampa:

And that's really where Sage comes in right. Can you explain to our listeners what Sage is and what role it plays for business today?

Darren Anguige:

Yeah, absolutely so. Sage offers a range of accounting, erp and business management solutions specifically built to help businesses simplify their processes, gain better financial control and manage operations more efficiently. And so, whether it's Sage 50 for smaller businesses or Sage 200 for growing organizations with more complex needs, sage really gives companies a robust platform to manage their day-to-day activities and plan confidently for their future. So, at BCM, we provide the following Sage product range so it's Sage 50. So it's an integrated accounting business management tool Sage 200 Standard, which is the SaaS financial and business management tool, and Sage 200 Professional, which is the on-premise advanced financial and business management tool. So all really good applications that we look after there.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great. Thank you, darren. As you mentioned, there are different Sage products out there Sage 50, sage 200. Colin, as a Sage business development manager, why would you recommend Sage 200 to a growing business?

Colin Leyland:

Okay. So for businesses that are growing or expecting to grow in the next couple of years, sage 200 is the perfect next step, particularly for those people who are using Sage 50. Unlike 50, which is designed for smaller businesses with simple requirements, sage 200 is a fully integrated ERP solution that brings together the financial and commercial requirements into one database. It's designed to give, as Darren said, better control, better visibility across departments, manage more complex requirements, while it still ring fences the individual responsibilities, without losing the ease of use that Sage is known for. Arguably, sage 200 is the most adaptable software package Sage delivers that will help you drive your business forward. Sage 200 is a mature ERP solution, evolved and I've been working with it for nearly 30 years, or its predecessors. It's now based in a SQL environment, so Microsoft SQL is used as the database management tools. Active Directory is used for security, so it becomes a very reliable and expandable and secure resource.

Colin Leyland:

Sage Stunder is incredibly flexible because it's modular, so business could can start with just the financial product and then, as they grow and mature, they can add the commercial products on. They can add things like billing, materials, manufacturing, crm, project accounting and even things like power bi to help them manage reporting and integrate reporting better into systems. The additional modules as you grow can be delivered in phases. So if you have a large project that you think you're going to be there in two years' time, you can start that now. Your business can benefit from those first bits of integrations, those first incremental benefits. As each piece is implemented and as the thing is scalable, you can then add multiple companies, multiple currency, and so the solution grows with your business as your business develops.

Colin Leyland:

Sage 200 also has a long established ecosystem of fully integrated third-party applications, which means you can tailor your. Sage 200 also has a long-established ecosystem of fully integrated third-party applications, which means you can tailor your Sage 200 without the necessity of bespoke to fit virtually any industry-specific requirement. Sage 200 therefore offers a single location for your financial, your commercial and your industry-specific requirements, making it easier to manage your financial, your commercial and your industry-specific requirements, making it easier to manage your business, giving reliable real-time reporting and allowing the decision-making process to become more efficient. It's also designed to offer multiple deployment options so you can be sure there's a suitable option not just for the application but also for the environment you want to run it within.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great. Thank you, colin. When it comes now to how Sage 200 is actually deployed, what options are available for businesses, depending on their needs?

Colin Leyland:

Okay. So Sage 200 was originally an on-premise solution. So you had a local server you connected to what are called fat clients on your local PCs or laptops. That then, over time, has evolved to be a hybrid solution. So you can have it on-prem, you can have it in cloud, you can have it in a private cloud. You can now also host it in Azure. So it doesn't matter what your business preference is or where you see your business growing to, so you could, in theory, put it on a local server. If you have one, in three years' time, you might say, with intending to move everything into Azure, we can take that 200 and move it back into Azure for you. So it's an evolving solution for you. Sage 200 doesn't just need to be wherever you've put it first. We can move it to grow and move with your business requirements, so you can choose how flexible you want to be within its deployment and within its usage.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great, great. Of course, having the right technology is only part of the story. Choosing the right software is important, but choosing the right partner is just as critical. At BCN, we combine our SAIT expertise with Microsoft infrastructure knowledge to deliver solutions that aren't just functional but fully optimized for the environment a business operates in. We hold accredited partnerships with both Sage and Microsoft, which means we can deliver robust, secure and future-ready solutions, not just basic installations. With decades of collective experience supporting businesses across various sectors, our Sage-certified team offers unmatched knowledge for the Sage product suite. So, colin, beyond the technology, how does BCN's way of working, that client-first approach, help businesses really succeed with their systems?

Colin Leyland:

So, as you said, at BCN we don't take an approach of selling you a product. What we look for is to try and appreciate what your business needs to do. So we try and understand your business first and then we propose things that would fit those challenges that your business has. So when we're designing a SAGE solution, it's time and effort at the front end of that whole process from yourselves and from your business partner that would be BCN to look at what you would need and how it would be deployed. So that might be.

Colin Leyland:

Does this need to be a project over a number of phases? Do we need to do data conversions, all sorts of things? So as a total business system, we would look and answer all those questions and then roll that into a comprehensive service, including scoping the whole project, doing the software implementation, configuring the software into the version that you need, help with the data migrations or advise what data migrations can be done. We provide user training to make sure there's good user adoption, because with that user adoption the project isn't successful. We can manage the whole project for you and we also then hand the project over once it's completed, once you're live within that environment, that's handed over to our ongoing support, which is an excellent service in itself.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great, okay, darren. We've talked a bit about Sage as an ERP solution and how BCN goes about delivering it. From your perspective as the lead of the Sage team, what are the team's biggest strengths when it comes to making the delivery a success?

Darren Anguige:

Because our team comes from real world business backgrounds and not just software backgrounds.

Darren Anguige:

We understand the day-to-day pressures that many companies face, whether it's supply chain issues, cash flow management, compliance or customer expectations. We've been there and we've lived it. That real-world experience means that we can ask the right questions during discovery, spot the challenges before they happen and deliver solutions that make a measurable difference. Our team maintains the highest level of SAGE certification, as we've mentioned previously, ensuring that we receive expert advice and implementation services, and we try to stay ahead of the curve with continuous education, keeping pace with Sage's evolving product suite. We also take a collaborative methodology as well, and so we take time to understand the business processes and challenges, and we work alongside your team to develop solutions that align with operational needs. This collaborative approach ensures that the implemented systems truly support a business's requirements. We also have industry-specific expertise as well, so we bring a specialised knowledge across multiple sectors, which includes manufacturing, professional services, legal and financial services. We have an industry awareness that allows us to configure Sage solutions that address sector-specific challenges and opportunities.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great. Finally, we know technology never stands still. How does Sage and how does PCN help businesses using already Sage stay ahead, whether it's with upgrades, innovations like AI or new business needs?

Darren Anguige:

Thanks, irini. So, as you mentioned, technology is always evolving and businesses need solutions that can keep up, and SAGE is investing heavily in making SAGE 200 even more adaptable, including exploring ideas like AI and smarter automation, although some of those innovations are still in development. At BCN, we can help our clients stay future ready by running a structured upgrade program. One that we've created is one that we upgrade every three years, and we encourage and support our customers to upgrade to those newer versions, keeping them aligned with Sage's latest features, security updates and compliance requirements. On top of that, we constantly monitor new Sage developments and proactively advise our customers about opportunities to improve efficiency or even just take advantage of emerging technologies. To improve efficiency or even just take advantage of emerging technologies whether that's better reporting tools, cloud capabilities or even the AI enhancements that I mentioned earlier it's a partnership that evolves with the client and the market need as well.

Eirini Katsampa:

Great. That brings us to the end of today's episode. Darren Colin , thank you both for sharing your insights and experience with us. It's been a really valuable conversation and thank you all for hearing our podcast. If you're curious about how SAGE can help your business improve operation decision-making and sustainable growth, it all starts with a simple SAGE assessment. Our experts can review your current systems, understand your goals and develop a tailored roadmap. Whether you are upgrading, implementing for the first time or optimizing an existing solution, when you're ready to take that next step, reach out to our SAITS team here at BCN. We'd love to help you unlock the full potentials of SAITS solutions and set your business up to future success. Think of PCN not as a provider, but as a business partner. If you have enjoyed today's podcast, like and subscribe so you don't miss out on our next episode. All our podcasts are