Summary: QuickBooks Online and Sage 100 both show up when manufacturing companies search for accounting software, but only Sage 100 can track your manufactured product and its components through each stage. Here’s an in-depth comparison to help you choose.
If you’ve ever had the frustrating task of reading between the lines on a software product’s website, you know that the best way to figure out what they’re actually saying… is to figure out what they’re not saying.
But that’s exhausting to do. So, to help all you manufacturers out there, we’ve created this clear comparison guide for QuickBooks Online vs. Sage 100 that (at the risk of sounding like a bot) “says the quiet part out loud.” Thank goodness!
What Is QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online is usually the first accounting software manufacturing companies think of, before they start looking into Sage 100. It’s cloud-based accounting software, meaning that you access it from your browser (e.g., Edge, Chrome, or Safari) instead of opening it as a program on your computer. It is sold in four tiers:
- Simple Start (1 user): helps with expense organization, cash flow insight, automated transaction categorization, basic AP, invoicing, and payment reminders.
- Essentials (3 users): gives you everything in Simple Start, plus multi-currency capabilities, testimonial collection solutions, contact forms, appointment scheduling, and manual time entry that you can use to clarify employee time on your invoices.
- Plus (5 users): provides everything in Essentials, plus budgeting tools, basic profitability tracking, inventory tracking (quantities, cost of goods, low-stock alerts, and sales trends), general anomaly detection for financials, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, item receipts, contract uploading and e-signatures, discounted shipping rates, and class/location tracking for your inventory.
- Advanced (25 users): offers everything in Plus, along with custom report building, KPI tracking, dashboards, forecasting, Excel syncing, workflow automation, batch invoicing and expensing, continuous backup and restore, enhanced project profitability tracking, fixed asset tracking, automated revenue recognition, and expert support with extended hours.
QuickBooks Online also provides 800+ integrations and includes Intuit’s AI tools that were built to act as a second pair of eyes across your modules.
What Is Sage 100?
Unlike QuickBooks Online, Sage 100 is an on-premises or cloud-hosted Enterprise Resource Planning solution (ERP), which means it manages both financials AND operations in a single program. When we say “on-premises or cloud-hosted,” we mean that you do not access it by navigating to a website, but instead install it on your in-house servers or a virtual server like AWS, and then double-click to open the application on your computer.
It’s sold in three bundles: Essentials, Advanced, and Complete. For manufacturers, Complete is the one to choose because it includes the Bill of Materials (BOM) module.
What Is the Bill of Materials?
The Bill of Materials module in Sage 100 supports 5 different types of bills, but the most important ones are Kit bills and Standard bills.
- Kit bills help you put together ready-to-sell products using finished goods.
For example: Say you sell indoor gardening sets comprised of 3 small terracotta pots, 3 packets of different seeds, a tiny watering can, and an assortment of little paints, brushes, plastic jewels, and glue so buyers can decorate their little terracotta pots. You don’t make the pots or the jewels from scratch; you buy them from a supplier and then assemble them into your ready-to-sell product.
This is where Sage 100 Kit bills come in. They provide single-level assemblies, which tell your staff which items belong in each set, along with comment lines that you can use to explain how those items should be arranged (such as the notes on secure packaging to keep the terracotta pots safe).
Most importantly, the Kit bill includes component item lists, so you know how much of each inventory item Kit A will use vs. Kit B, and you can manage your inventory accordingly to keep production humming along.
- Standard bills help you create ready-to-sell products using raw materials.
For example, say you make and sell little terracotta pots, which you create by molding and firing clay alloys. Your inventory consists of clay, the proprietary alloy you use, molds, and, uh… other key materials we have no idea about because we don’t make terracotta pots (wink).
Recently, you closed a new customer with a seemingly insatiable need for pots, because they sell them in cute little DIY kits. Their impressive ordering pace is making you ramp up production.
Standard bills in Sage 100 are going to make this possible. They include multiple layers and sub-assemblies, which not only tell your shop floor crew how to make pots, but also how to make the clay alloy (which you have to make blocks of, so you have the materials to make new pots).
Standard bills also include phantom bills, which are items that are created and used immediately (not stocked in inventory), such as one that would include comment lines about setting up molds properly. And they also include miscellaneous charge codes, which explode the costs for things that aren’t physical goods, like shipping surcharges for the hefty bags of clay you order.
And, finally, Standard bills include component lists, so you can manage your raw materials inventory effectively.
Sage 100 provides other BOM features, like the ability to build base bills that you can adjust flexibly, and engineering change control that keeps a record of every revision you make to your BOMs over time.
Sage 100 also offers Production Management.
What Is Production Management?
Production Management for Sage 100 builds on BOM functionality with work-in-process visibility and tracking, reusable Work Ticket Templates that function as paperless routing documents, and fast-to-create Work Tickets that capture quantity, process steps, materials, necessary components, and labor/material budgets. It also helps with scheduling, so you can more confidently determine dates and capacity.
Whether you’re assembling DIY indoor gardening kits or manufacturing terracotta pots, Production Management is what gives you real-time insight into your raw materials or inventory quantities, and how many finished goods you have ready to sell.
It integrates directly with Sage 100’s Payroll, Accounts Payable, Purchase Order, and BOM modules, so data moves automatically instead of you having to re-enter it by hand. And, when you pair it with the Mobility for Manufacturing add-on, your team can log labor, inventory issues, and completed production steps in real time from the shop floor, using your choice of rugged scanners, phones, or tablets.
What’s the Difference Between QuickBooks Online vs. Sage 100 for Manufacturers?
To make it short:
- Sage 100 has in-depth manufacturing capabilities.
- QuickBooks Online has no manufacturing capabilities.
QuickBooks Online doesn’t have a single-level BOM, or a multi-level BOM, or production planning. Without BOMs, a manufacturer on QuickBooks Online will be tracking inventory usage after the fact, often in a spreadsheet, and may not find out until partway through a production run that they’re short on a specific component or material.
Plus, without a system that tells you exactly what a build consumes, QuickBooks Online users would be more likely to play it safe by over-ordering materials “just in case.” This can tie up cash you didn’t need to spend.
Which One Should You Choose?
QuickBooks Online is solid cloud accounting software, and Plus/Advanced add basic inventory functionality, along with strong project-tracking capabilities that simplify your billing by labor and expense.
However, if you manufacture or assemble the same products, from the same components, over and over, you’ll need a Bill of Materials.
Sage 100 Complete gives you a full Bill of Materials built in. QuickBooks can’t give you a BOM at all.
To meet your needs, you have two reasonable options:
- Some manufacturers choose to rely on QuickBooks Online for their financials and then connect a separate, QuickBooks-integrated manufacturing solution to handle their operations.
In our experience, this increases training time for staff (because they have to learn two separate systems), usually requires some additional manual entry, and results in headaches around upgrades and support because keeping two separate programs in sync isn’t always flawless. Plus, it may result in extra licensing costs.
- Some manufacturers choose to keep all their financial and operational data in one comprehensive system: Sage 100.
This can simplify training, upgrades, and licensing, and eliminates sync issues because the same program runs financials, inventory, purchasing, sales, and manufacturing. Using one comprehensive system can also speed up support because you’ll only have one software provider to call, instead of two or more.
Every business is unique, which means everyone’s needs and preferences will vary.
Want to learn more about QuickBooks Online vs. Sage 100 for manufacturing?
