Sage 300 vs Sage Intacct for Purchase Order Cost and Import

Sage 300 is an on-premise or hybrid ERP with its own Purchase Orders (P/O) and Order Entry (O/E) modules, and it imports purchase orders from a two-sheet Excel or CSV file you generate from the entry screen. Sage Intacct is cloud only, runs purchase orders as Purchasing transactions, and imports them from a flat CSV template where every line repeats the header. Neither one reads a PDF purchase order. Sage 300 subscriptions start around $75 per user per month on third-party estimates, while Intacct is quote only and usually lands between $10,000 and $15,000 a year for the smallest deployments. Sage X3, the Sage ERP aimed at larger and multi-site companies, has its own import route, covered in Sage X3 purchase order import.

Most comparisons of these two products are written by Sage partners who sell both, and they spend their time on cloud versus on-premise and multi-entity consolidation. Those matter. But if your business runs on purchase orders, whether you issue them to suppliers or receive them from customers, the questions that decide the move are narrower: how each system handles the PO cycle, how data gets in, what happens to your open orders on cutover day, and what it costs. That is what this page covers. Comparing Sage 100 rather than Sage 300? The cost math for that pair is in Sage 100 vs Sage Intacct. Already settled on Intacct and shopping for an add-on? We priced the purchase order software for Sage Intacct that genuinely integrates.

Sage 300 vs Sage Intacct at a glance

The last two rows are the ones people skip. Both systems load structured files well, and both leave you to produce that file from whatever your supplier or customer actually sent.

Is Sage Intacct better than Sage 300 for purchase orders?

Not automatically. Intacct is the better fit when the business is finance-led, spread across several entities, and wants a cloud system with dimensional reporting. Sage 300 is the better fit for distributors and manufacturers who need inventory, order entry and purchasing tightly coupled on their own servers, and who have years of process built around its modules. For purchase orders specifically, both cover the requisition, order, receipt and invoice cycle. The real difference is how each one is configured and how data gets in.

How purchase orders work in Sage 300

In Sage 300 the cycle is split across screens in the P/O module: requisition entry, purchase order entry, receipt entry and invoice entry. A purchase order can be active, standing, future or blanket. When you pick the vendor number on a new order, Sage 300 fills in the billing address, the default tax group and the payment terms, and it numbers the order from the prefix, length and next number you set in P/O Options.

Imports run from the same screen. You open P/O Purchase Order Entry, choose File then Export to generate a template with the fields you need, fill it, and choose File then Import. The file has a header sheet and a lines sheet, tied together by a sequence number called PORHSEQ that you assign yourself: 1 for the first order, 2 for the second, repeated on every line of each order. The full field mapping is on our Sage 300 purchase order import page.

How purchase orders work in Sage Intacct

Intacct treats a purchase order as one type of Purchasing transaction. What each transaction does, whether it needs approval, what it converts into next and how it affects inventory is set in a transaction definition, which is why two Intacct companies can run purchasing quite differently. A typical chain runs from a requisition to a purchase order, then to a receiver when goods arrive, then to the vendor invoice.

The import is a CSV template you download from Purchasing, All, Transactions, by selecting the transaction type and choosing Import. The template is generated for your company, so it includes your dimensions and custom fields. The required columns include TRANSACTIONTYPE, which names the transaction definition, DATE, VENDOR_ID, DATEDUE, and on each line LINE, ITEMID, QUANTITY and UNIT, plus STATE, which takes Draft, Submitted, Pending or Closed.

Importing purchase orders in the two formats side by side

Two details catch people moving from one to the other. Intacct IDs are case sensitive, so ven100 and VEN100 are different vendors and a Sage 300 export with mixed case will fail or, worse, match the wrong record. And Intacct rejects a file whose headers have been retyped, even with one extra space, so always start from the downloaded template rather than a copy of an old one.

How do you move open purchase orders from Sage 300 to Sage Intacct?

Most teams do not migrate closed purchase order history transaction by transaction. They bring over the open orders, with only the quantity still to be received, and keep the Sage 300 database available read-only for history. The sequence that works:

1. Export open orders from P/O Purchase Order Entry with File, Export, using Set Criteria to limit the export to orders that are not complete.
2. Clean the vendor and item masters first. Codes that were loose in Sage 300 need to become exact, case-matched IDs in Intacct.
3. Reshape the two-sheet export into Intacct's flat layout: copy the header values down onto every line and number LINE from 1 within each order.
4. Set TRANSACTIONTYPE to your purchase order definition and STATE to match how the order should land, then test with five orders.
5. Load the rest, processing offline if the batch is large, and reconcile the count of orders and the open value against Sage 300.

Step 2 is where most of the time goes. Vendor lists that grew over ten years carry duplicates, trailing spaces and three spellings of the same supplier, and Intacct will not forgive any of them. It is worth running the vendor and item exports through a CSV dedupe and normalize step before building the import, rather than finding the problems one failed row at a time.

What does each cost?

Neither system has a price you can read off the Sage website. Sage 300 is sold through partners; the independent site ERP Research lists a starting point of about $75 per user per month on subscription. Sage says nothing public about Intacct pricing, and the same research site puts the smallest deployments at $10,000 to $15,000 a year, with typical customers at $25,000 to $75,000 a year depending on users and modules. Implementation is on top in both cases and usually costs more than the first year of software.

For purchase orders, the cost that does not appear in either quote is the typing. Both systems assume the order data is already structured. If your order desk or AP team keys twenty PDF purchase orders a day, that labor continues on either platform, and a migration is the moment many teams notice it because every open order has to be retyped or reshaped anyway.

Where PDF purchase orders fit in either system

PurchaseOrders reads a purchase order document, a supplier PDF, a scanned page or a customer order attached to an email, and returns the header and every line as Excel, CSV or JSON. You paste those rows into the Sage 300 two-sheet template or the Intacct flat CSV. It does not connect to either system or post transactions; the import stays in your hands. Plans are published: Starter is $49 a month or $288 a year, and Plus is $149 a month or $888 a year. The Intacct side of the mapping is on purchase order to Sage Intacct, and a cutover backlog of open orders goes through bulk purchase order upload in one pass. If you are staying on Intacct and want approvals, intake or receiving on top of its Purchasing module, we priced the purchase order software compatible with Sage Intacct in a separate comparison.

Which should a distributor choose?

If you run inventory, order entry and purchasing as one operation and your process depends on Sage 300 modules, staying is a defensible choice, and fixing the data entry in front of it is cheaper than a migration. If finance is the center of the business, you have several entities, and you want out of server maintenance, Intacct is the natural step up within Sage. Teams comparing further afield usually look at Acumatica vs NetSuite for purchase orders, and those staying inside the Sage family on a smaller scale land on Sage 100.

Frequently asked questions

Is Sage 300 being discontinued?

No. Sage has announced no end of life for Sage 300. It still ships an annual release (Sage 300 2026 came out in September 2025) and supports the current version plus the two before it, so 2023 is already out of support. What Sage does is point new cloud customers toward Intacct, which is a different product, not a newer version of Sage 300.

Can Sage Intacct import purchase orders from Excel?

Yes, through a CSV template. Download it from the Purchasing transaction list, fill it in Excel, save as CSV and import. The headers must match the template exactly and every vendor and item ID must already exist. Intacct does not import PDF purchase orders.

Can I import purchase orders into Sage 300 from a PDF?

No. Sage 300 imports Excel, CSV, Access, ODBC and XML files. A PDF has to be converted to rows first, by hand or with a purchase order PDF to Excel converter, and then pasted into the exported template.