Summary: Sage 100 is the stronger make-to-order manufacturing software choice for tracking orders, scheduling, and materials. This guide compares it with QuickBooks Online across five common MTO challenges.
Ever read a webpage or brochure for manufacturing software and wonder why everyone only talks about make-to-stock? Let’s change that trend and talk about how Sage 100 and QuickBooks each handle the challenges of a make-to-order (MTO) plant.
How Sage 100 and QuickBooks Online Handle the 5 Top Challenges of Make-to-Order Manufacturing
No one wants to read feature lists. So, here’s a small snippet of your day-to-day experience using Production Management in Sage 100 vs. QuickBooks Online.
- You receive a personalized order with lots of variables
Sage 100 – When you receive the order, all relevant info shows up on the work ticket. It’s your main information stop for quick access to accurate order and status data. The work ticket generates automatically from the sales order or a template you created, and it includes routing, bill of materials, operations, and cost information in one place. You can add materials, log labor, and record actuals as your work continues. You can also import data when needed.
QuickBooks – Since QuickBooks is not manufacturing software, it has no automated flow from your order to your manufacturing operations. You will need to copy and paste into a bunch of spreadsheets or batch-sync overnight to a third-party manufacturing solution. This takes extra time and, at best, delays data. At worst, it leads to incorrect orders that can impact your margins and reputation.
- You schedule production
Sage 100 – Because it is make-to-order manufacturing software, Sage 100 helps you schedule each order flexibly and provides the information you need on routing, capacity, and queue time by work center, so you can make clear decisions with all the data in front of you.
QuickBooks – QuickBooks has no production scheduling capabilities. Most people handle this in spreadsheets that get updated each day. Since every order is different, updating that spreadsheet takes expertise. This can slow production when your scheduling expert is out on vacation, and it makes it hard to train someone new.
- You collect materials from your inventory
Sage 100 – Since Sage 100 is an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), it syncs information between modules. This means that when you create a sales order, it allocates raw materials from your stock and can determine whether you face a potential stockout. If you do, it can generate a purchase order for you.
Sage 100 also has a Bill of Materials (BOM) module included in the Complete version for manufacturers. With it, you can set a base bill and flexibly adjust it to fit your various configurations and options. It knows what raw materials you’ll need for each order, auto-allocates them, and can also backflush inventory records after the fact based on what you built.
QuickBooks – QuickBooks Online has good inventory tracking capabilities and low-stock alerts, but they kick in only after you’ve used the stock, not on allocation. Without a BOM, your system won’t know what inventory you’ll use until you’ve used it, which can lead to last-minute scrambles and delayed orders.
- A customer calls to ask you about their order
Sage 100 – With real-time updates, you can easily see your labor, material usage, inventory, and order status, so you can answer customer questions instantly.
QuickBooks – You can guess what I’m going to say here. Considering the manual copy-pasting required for all production orders in QuickBooks Online, you’ll have to call that customer back tomorrow. Perhaps you’re waiting for your nightly automated sync from a third-party solution, or your supervisor updates the production spreadsheet at the end of the day. Either way, your customer has to wait too.
- Tariffs raise your costs, and you wonder how much you should raise prices
Sage 100 – Tariffs make costs unpredictable, which means you’ll need to change your prices more often than you used to. Sage 100 gives you actual costs for labor, materials, and overhead when you need them, so you can confidently update your prices. Plus, since everything is connected in one system, you can filter and report (or view dashboards) to analyze your actuals. Sage 100 enhancements can also handle tariff management for your Accounting team.
QuickBooks – Reporting labor and finances from QuickBooks Online (Advanced) is fast and easy. But reporting from your manufacturing spreadsheets and your supply chain spreadsheets and your production spreadsheets… well, that’s much slower. By the time you gather the data, export it, and format it, prices have probably changed. Again.
Which Make-to-Order Manufacturing Software Should You Choose?
QuickBooks Online isn’t actually make-to-order manufacturing software, so I strongly recommend you don’t choose it to support your MTO business. But that doesn’t mean I automatically recommend Sage 100.
I’ve worked with Sage 100 for a long time, and my company, VBCC, has been named the #1 Solution Provider of Sage 100 manufacturing software for 15 consecutive years.
Those years of experience have made me a realist.
For many companies, Sage’s combination of cost and raw capability is a strong fit. But is it a strong fit for you? You’ve been researching – you know the playing field. The best (and fastest) way to determine which MTO software will work for your company is to ask friendly experts for honest answers.
And I happen to know where you can find precisely those experts…
