Affordable, Scalable, SAP Business One

Think you can't afford business software from SAP?  Think again.  Costs increase with the size of your system, but you could start running SAP Business One for a license cost of just:

£26*


per calendar month

*Software license cost for a single user, hosting fees will apply

You can discover more about the full Online50 commercial proposition at this link.

Our pricing model is explained with examples at this link.

You can compare the costs of Online50's offerings for SAP Business One and Sage 50 at this link.

Scaling SAP Business One Functionality

With a comprehensive integrated system like SAP Business One there is a lot of functionality in the core product, and even more functionality when you consider the range of Add-Ons available.  But you don't have to use all of it if you don't need to, and you may find that you can reduce license costs when you don't use it all.  Of course you have the reassurance that all of the functionality remains available to you, waiting for you to be ready to use it.

It's also good to know that you don't have to always use the system in the same way.  As your business evolves you will want to review your business processes and to support changes to those processes you may find that you can change which features of SAP Business One you use.  As an example consider the following scenario:

Top Flight Entertainments is a business that runs 'hospitality' venues.  Their first venue is a trendy nightspot in Manchester which has developed a strong reputation and is now trading profitably.  However revenues are restricted primarily because of the size of the venue.  The owners are considering a number of growth opportunities.  Firstly they are considering similar venues in other locations.  They think that their first nightspot has sufficient brand recognition that similar operations in suitable locations ought to become just as profitable quite quickly.  Secondly they are thinking of other activities, which may or may not operate from the same premises.  As they expand they want to centralise control of their costs, but retain full visibility of the performance of the different venues and activities, and also allow on-site managers to have adequate local control to devolve local purchasing, cash management and bookings to them.

There are a number of ways that SAP Business One could support this scenario.  One mechanism that may be suitable would be to allow them to produce a Profit and Loss statement that could cover individual venues, individual activities, or ranges of each as appropriate.  This can be dome by introducing segmentation on the nominal ledger.  SAP Business One makes segmentation of the nominal ledger optional, with up to 5 different dimensions.  Every posting to the nominal ledger must specify the nominal code plus a valid value for each of the dimensions in use.  It is possible to start operating the system with no dimensions, and then to add on dimensions as the need arises.  Of course once transactions are posted into the dimensions the dimensions cannot be removed and so this particular change cannot be reversed.  (Although individual values for the dimensions can be marked as no longer in use, there would still have to be at least one valid value for each of the dimensions.)

As Top Flight Entertainments chose SAP Business One early in the life of their business and chose to use the software via a flexible Online50 subscription they can consider the opportunities to expand the business without the concern of the cost of an IT system upgrade.  Most other packages suitable for businesses from launch could not support the segmentation of the nominal ledger in this way and so if they had chosen such a package they would be facing the costs and disruption of changing their business systems, at exactly the point where they need up to date accurate information to support the expansion of the business.  Because their subscription with Online50 provides access to SAP Business One over the Internet there are no additional IT requirements for the new locations to enable access for remote users.

Scaling SAP Business One Capacity

One of the reasons people need to upgrade their IT systems (both software and hardware) is to cope with 'more' — whether it is more data, more transactions, more users, more processes, more analysis, more red tape, or more of anything else.  Any system will have capacity limits.  How does a subscription for SAP Business One services from Online50 help users to cope with the never ending requirement for 'more'?

Unlike systems that have been built on proprietary or flat-file databases SAP Business One uses an enterprise quality database for working with your data.  This allows it to cope with very high transaction volumes and user numbers, especially when compared to systems that don't use such systems.  Where there are large amounts of historical data it is possible to purge old historical data that is not needed from the system, but many customers find that this is never needed to cope with the volume of data, it is only carried out to make working with that data more convenient for users.

Online50 provides the infrastructure required to run your SAP Business One software as part of your subscription fees.  This includes the cost of managing the IT infrastructure and replacing equipment as necessary to ensure the systems remain up to date and with sufficient capacity.  This gives you the added freedom of not having to worry about IT upgrade cycles and capacity management.

Your SAP Business One subscription from Online50 also includes software maintenance so that you can keep your SAP software up to date.  As new versions and features are released our team is testing them to ensure that when customers are ready to upgrade the process will be a smooth one.