Good alternatives to Sage

Hi all,

I own my own Flooring Contractor business and am also a qualified bookkeeper with ICB. We have always used Sage mainly because this has always been de-facto and we have not dared to try anything else.

We deploy Sage 50 Financial Controller with the CIS addition (now called Sage CIS).  We also deploy Sage Payroll Professional. Payroll is only a one company one user system. Sage 50 is multicompany, multi-user.  Both packages we find are overkill for our requirements but the trouble is we need some features but not all.  Because I have used Sage for many years and know all of it's short-comings for our business I always try to keep a keen eye out for a suitable alternative which I am yet to find.  I now also find Sage support and upgrades horrendously expensive because of the packages we have but I cannot downgrade because I would lose some of the functionality that I need like the CIS module.

Here are just a few of my problems:

Sage 50 CIS contains Purchase Order Processing.  However because of the way we work (cuts/rolls/widths) stock control is a feature we do not use. We therefore use a manual Purchase Order processing system so this is a feature that is not required. This is carried through to Sales Order Processing which again we do not use. Instead we raise invoices manually and they re-enter them into Sage. We do not batch but re-enter the whole invoice as a free text invoice.  This is very boring and we only do this to maintain some professionism in producing computerised rather than hand written invoices.  The job costing feature included within this package is also relatively useless to us.

What we could do with is a system that would accomodate valuations/retentions and financials rather than having lots of features which we will never use like POP/SOP.

Can anyone make any recommendations on a good all round alternative to Sage that would maybe more suited to us.  To be honest apart from CIS we could get away with using Sage Instant Accounts and a very basic payroll software. All the extras in Sage that we are paying for are basically useless to us and we seem to pay a very handsum sum for the pleasure (or not). I would rather have better financials etc. like multidimesional Gen Ledger than POP for instance.

I have heard of IRIS and PEGASUS but it is all a bit of a mine field to me and any advice would be gratefully received even if it is not what I want to hear which would be "stick with Sage".

Thanks in anticipation.

Stefan