Largest Sage/Xero/VT/QB client

What's your biggest client on the 'smallest' software?

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When I saw this thread, https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/job-costing-software-for-con... it struck me that £15-20m t/o is probably pretty large for Sage Line 50. So what is the biggest client you have that runs their business (turnover) on entry-level software? Sage Line 50, Xero, Quickbooks, VT, you know the sort of thing. 

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Replies (20)

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By Ken Howard
22nd Jun 2021 20:00

About 25 years ago, I was using Pegasus DOS desktop software (not Opera, it was the more basic version, can't remember it's name, was it Pegasus Senior?)), for a manufacturing company with a 30 million turnover. It actually did the job remarkably well considering, but we had relatively few customers with generally very large invoices, so the sales ledger was pretty small/simple. It did struggle with the purchase ledger and stock, and we used spreadsheets for job costing. It was ridiculously slow though.

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ALISK
By atleastisoundknowledgable...
22nd Jun 2021 22:48

£4m professional firm on Xero as an opener …
It’s only about 20 sales per year, so not sure whether that’s within the fair play rules.

Line 50 was included in the list, which I’d say was more of a middle-sized software … I have a £10m haulage company on that.

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By jonharris999
23rd Jun 2021 07:01

IMHO the type/number of the sales is likely to be more critical than the size of the turnover here.

Neither Sage 50, Xero nor QB are going to cope with a large number of small sales without an add-on such as Vend etc. If it's not that kind of business, they will cope with large numbers, certainly into the teens of £m.

I have one client happily using Sage 50 to £20m, but with an added-on ERP for sales and detailed customer stuff which then exports only total sale value to Sage. Another is using Xero happily to about £5m, lots of small sales imported from Vend and the added bonus of Payroll included.

I'd be more suspicious of QB up to these levels but I haven't used it as much as the others so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.

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A Putey FACA
By Arthur Putey
23rd Jun 2021 07:19

£1bn t/o
1 invoice
Xero copes with it remarkably well and I am resisting any suggestion they upgrade to SAP.

The capabilities of any platform are more about how it handles processes, volumes and multicompany/currency rather than t/o. Xero's rule of thumb is if you have more than 500 a month of anything you are probably too big for it. But if the complex processes are served by other systems and you are only putting summary data into accounting, for a UK company the entry level products can be good enough.

The QuickBooks desktop version was/is surprisingly capable.

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Replying to Arthur Putey:
By Moonbeam
23rd Jun 2021 09:59

Thank you Arthur. I didn't know about the 500 a month rule, but that sounds exactly the right way of measuring stuff. Turnover is beside the point.

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Replying to Arthur Putey:
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By WhichTyler
23rd Jun 2021 13:54

I agree that turnover doesn't always equal complexity or volume (but tracking how that £1bn is spent/invested/taxed might )

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By paul.benny
23rd Jun 2021 09:22

There was a query on here a couple of weeks ago from a £100m turnover business using Sage 50.

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By ireallyshouldknowthisbut
23rd Jun 2021 09:36

I have a £15million t/o client on Xero.

Average sale (and they are all in there, ie they don't use day books despite my suggesting they could do so) is about £75.

it works well for them, but all the "crunch" is dealt with elsewhere in terms of the customer side, its really just adding it up in Xero and dealing with the overheads of an industrial unit and half a dozen staff. They dont use the payroll of course as it sucks.

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Replying to ireallyshouldknowthisbut:
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By WhichTyler
23rd Jun 2021 13:52

£15m with six staff is pretty good going

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By Tax Dragon
23rd Jun 2021 10:00

I thought MTD was about putting small clients on big software.

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Replying to Tax Dragon:
A Putey FACA
By Arthur Putey
23rd Jun 2021 11:54

Its ,more like trying to squeeze into clothing that no longer fits

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By Leywood
23rd Jun 2021 12:15

I know many £25M + companies in different industries using sage 50.

Works well.

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Replying to Leywood:
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By WhichTyler
23rd Jun 2021 16:34

Leywood wrote:

sage 50.... Works well.

I didn't think you were allowed to say that round here! May be it does work best in places that are big enough to have an accounts team that understands accounts (and get audited), rather than DIYers taking the 'how hard can it be' approach...

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Glenn Martin
By Glenn Martin
24th Jun 2021 00:37

Recriutment Co on Xero with £9m sales runs without issue.

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By jon_griffey
24th Jun 2021 11:57

£50M+ on Clearbooks

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John Toon
By John Toon
24th Jun 2021 12:24

Top line turnover is irrelevant here. The limiting factor is transaction volume...

Top Xero client turnover is £50m, top Sage 50 £35m. I don't have any clients on SBCA, QBO, VT etc

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ALISK
By atleastisoundknowledgable...
24th Jun 2021 13:56

Amazon seller on Xero with monthly volumes of 1500 sales, 1500 sets of amazon fees and c100 CoS/overheads.

I once had a SaaS company on Line 50 with c700,000 transactions and 9 concurrent users - the management were always confused/moaning about the software being slow and crashing. Sage were shocked that it worked at all (I think they said there was a limit of 500k)and quoted £30k one-off + £30kpa to upgrade to Line 100, which was point blank refused. Transactions were c100k pa at that stage and I think their t/o was c£15m and profit c£1m. But £30kpa was too much as they were only paying c£10k at the time.

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By NewACA
25th Jun 2021 10:56

Generally, online software handles many times fewer transactions than desktop small company software. I had a bakery client whose xero system kept crashing. T/O £10m. About 70 vans on HPs, 150 staff, average sale £30. You simply couldn't run the detailed vat report, it just hanged for an age and timed out, very scary! Had to get them off that asap!! Sage 50 or QB desktop could have coped. I once worked on accounts for a £250m worldwide security company with 260 staff. There were about 8 concurrent users of QB desktop, never had any problems. KPMG kept trying to pinch the client, and recommended £50k/annum software. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Needless to say KPMG never got the client.

PS. What about biggest client using Excel??

I had a £6m T/O property development company building new homes on Excel without a problem, about 1300 purchases a year, but just 3 sales a year (luxury new homes). Ltd Co, full TB, General Ledger out of Excel. I'm told if you hook up Excel to MS Access which holds the data, it runs much better for many thousands of sales and/or purchases. If the data is held centrally in Access, you could have concurrent users using different Excel files to post and read transactions.

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Replying to NewACA:
John Toon
By John Toon
25th Jun 2021 12:58

NewACA wrote:

Generally, online software handles many times fewer transactions than desktop small company software.

Not true - most of the big cloud accounting packages are hosted on AWS, Azure etc. Sage One started life on a second tier provider and there were no end of problems with this, but these are long since fixed. There's very little limitation in terms of transaction volumes that can be processed on these servers. The trouble comes with getting reports to load at the local machine. For Xero, for example, the server will run the required report but then has to pump this info down the line to the user. If there isn't enough bandwidth etc the reports will fail due to a timeout. See https://www.growthpath.com.au/Business-IT/xero-stress-test

So for a user with a crumby connection their transaction volume limitation in terms of running reports will be lower than someone on a large bandwidth fibre connection. This doesn't really impact on transaction processing, unless you have a lot of concurrent users entering items into the system, but if you're using cloud software efficiently you shouldn't be keying in that much info anyway I'd hope.

I'm not a frequent Sage 50 user anymore but for many clients with reasonably high volumes you needed to start removing data after 3 or 4 years, generally, to keep things stable. There were published limits but I CBA finding them.

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7om
By Tom 7000
25th Jun 2021 15:07

20m on spreadsheets.. and bridging software

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