Having recently seen a few disgruntled posts about Sage short comings and costs I wonder if I am missing something. I am a bookkeeper not an accountant, have a heavy paper load to get through most days - a lot of data entry. I run a purchase ledger / sales ledger / bank rec etc for all of my clients who are mainly too big to manage office load themselves but too small to justify employing someone full time. I have some experience with Xero and find it slow and clunky - as far as I can tell it would also break me financially to operate 20+ clients on Xero or any other cloud package. Is there truly another viable option to Sage in my circumstances? I don't have an issue with support, I pick up the phone to them maybe a couple of times a month and they've always been great. Have said all this I don't want to be stuck in my ways and stick with a way of working just because it's 'what I've always done' General thoughts and winges welcome.
Related resources
Replies (17)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
I find Sage fine for basic bookkeeping, eg keying invoices. It's when you want to extract useful information it gets bogged down.
You are a bookkeeper, not an accountant. You are coming at it from the front. The other end is not so pretty.
Thanks guys. Interesting - I am heavy on managemet reporting which I find OK thro Sage unless very specific and then it's dump to excel. As you rightly say I don't have to deal with the sticky end (hoorah!) if nice and tidy to TB and rec'd up etc what is it that is difficult to extract?
One of my regular tasks is to produce a monthly list for payment from Creditors. What my procedure for years has been download an detailed aged creditors list to Excel and subtotal each creditor. It is a lot quicker to go through the spreadsheet and open up the invoice list to find out why it doesn't match the balance on the statement. Doing this direct on Sage involves a lot of clicking backwards and forwards.
Have you thought about using ODBC links into Excel, and then pivot tables?
Refreshes automatically, and totals will match the source data.
Have you used Sageone?
Xero and the cloud stuff only works quickly if teamed up with receipt bank if you have large batches of invoices.
You should maybe look as Sageone as that is the natural migration for cleints who use sage desktop stuff.
They have a deal on some cheap cash book versions of it which are good for simple jobs where you just have to code the bank feed. Cheap alternative and not that bad to use.
Thanks Glenzy, I haven't looked too far into Sageone having dismissed it as still in it's infancy. Will look into. Currently trying to un pick a nasty hashed-up bank rec on Xero and resisting the urge to throw my laptop out of the window.
Sage One is a very basic system and takes a lot longer to do entries in than desktop Sage. OK, we're still getting used to it, but it is slower than Xero. Thankfully we've only got a couple of clients that insist on us using it. It is nowhere near as good as the normal Sage products.
I agree with Spilly - dont do it. SageOne is dreadfully slow. They have introduce quick entries for invoices, but its still painfully slow. In fact thats an understatement. if you are used to being able to wade through vast volumes of work via Sage 50, think at least three times that to get it into sageone, never mind the internet down time or the occasions where internet signal might drop for a second or three or the signal strength isnt so great. Horrendous bit of kit!
Try QuickBooks online, works very well for us and you get a discount
bank recon and navigation is easier the any other i have seen myself
Quickbooks on line. If you sign up to its partner program the fees are a lot less than xero. It now has a desktop application to work with its cloud app that means that Qbooks online is twice as fast, or so it claims. Tel 0808 234 5337
I'm a 'bookkeeper not an accountant' too so my two-penneth for what it's worth to add to the thread. I use SageOne for most of my lot (I mean valued clients!), varying degrees of requirement but mostly purchase ledger, bank recs & VAT returns. I like it, bank feed is great; it IS a bit slow sometimes on invoice entry but if a business had that many entries that it made it a problem, I'd be encouraging them to 'upgrade' to 'proper' Sage anyway & that starts at £25 a month now not the £hundreds it used to. As an accountant, you get a dashboard with all your clients on it & it needn't cost you anything as you pass that cost on to your clients, and sometimes you can earn a bit on commission or by 're-selling' a licence at advertised monthly fee that you may have been able to buy as a bundle much lower. But you don't have to do that as you can get them to sign up & pay directly & just give you access. They have just recently changed the offers - again - so I can't comment on the new offerings but I think they're similar to the 'old' ones -' cashbook' is VERY basic but 'accounting' does most everything. Telephone support is great - 24/7/365 & free. The online help is also ok. If you get accredited (easy 'test' & buy some bundle, you can get a trainer to come to you at your convenience too, I should be doing that in next few weeks. Sage isn't perfect (none of them are), and they are heavy on the sales pitch - I complain constantly - but the software still works & it is still a name that most businesses have heard of & will trust. IMO. I do not work for Sage & I do use other packages but prefer this one. If you want to chat more, my website (same as email) will give you a phone number to get hold of me - I don't think I'm allowed to put my contact details on here? Good luck though with whatever you choose.
Hello from a bookkeeping perspective, I use VT transactions for all my clients and would choose it every time over SAGE. VT is user friendly and easy to input, does everything that SAGE does, you can see at a glance debtors, creditors bank recs etc and you can copy and paste information from VT into excel for Management reporting.
Another vote for VT Software here.
If there is a lot of manual data inputting and queries that often need resolving later etc then forget all online products and Sage. VT is fantastic for those clients. It's similar to Sage but far easier to use and allows full and quick (and I mean instant!) editability of everything and instant drill down functions that Sage can't offer. It's also "intelligent" when transactions are being allocated.
Of course if you can use bank feeds and get automation in place then online products and bankstream etc work well for those clients, but it's not always practical particularly for "awkward info lacking" clients. VT can work in a similar way in that you can use the data upload facility to import transactions from a bank csv download and then VT intelligently guesses where the transactions should be allocated in the accounts.
Only downside is that VAT submissions have to be done manually via HMRC's portal but VT say that element will arrive following HMRC's announcement that is the future!
Have a look at Reckon. Designed like Xero, but very cheap, modular (only pay for the module you need that month), not suffering from the speed issues that Xero seems to be having
Have you looked at VT+. I run bookkeeping for several clients on this and find it much easier and quicker from an input and reconciliation point of view and also much cheaper than Sage. It may not have all the bells and whistles that Sage seems to have but copes with most of what I need it to do.
