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Nick Goode at Sage Summit UK 2017
Sage Summit UK 2017
Sage Summit UK 2017 report

Sage takes to the cloud at summit

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6th Apr 2017
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All roads lead to the cloud for Sage customers and partners who visited ExCel in East London this week for Sage Summit.

The inaugural UK event is part of a global tour Sage is putting on to take its message to customers in its main regional markets. With a 90ft stage, massive video project screens and celebrity speakers such as LastMinute.com founder Martha Lane-Fox and Debra Meaden from TV’s ‘Dragon’s Den’, the keynote sessions were all about showbiz glitz and reassuring messages.

Referring to the company at one point as “the safest pair of hands in the business,” Sage UK and Ireland managing director Alan Laing promised to support customers for life by delivering “100% compliance, 100% of the time”.

For the accountants who attended on Wednesday, the big draw was to find out more about Making Tax Digital: what were Sage’s plans, and when could they expect to see software to manage the process?

The answers were covered by the catch all “100% compliance” motto and sight of a Sage One-based proof of concept demo of an MTD solution that's due in the autumn as part of the Sage Accountants Cloud.

Laing and other Sage executives detailed how Sage was evolving its main product portfolios on the cloud: Sage One for start-ups; Sage Live for “scale-ups” and Sage X3 for enterprise users, plus professional cloud tools for accountants and the ever-present AI digital assistant, Pegg.

Sage mapped out its promises to build “end-to-end” cloud solutions on a huge product roadmap that made its debut at the Sage Summit in Chicago last year. While it continued to push deeper into cloud technology, Laing said: “We commit to continue supporting the use of desktop and cloud users.”

The global messaging was polished, and consistently delivered by Sage staff at the event. Since CEO Stephen Kelly moved to Sage from his role as government chief operating officer in November 2014, the company has certainly rediscovered its technology mojo - but a lot of the products businesses and accountants want are still just coloured blobs on a gigantic PowerPoint slide.

For example, Sage launched its cloud crusade nearly two years ago with a practice suite initially branded as Sage Impact. This was sidelined as Sage devoted more attention to the more sophisticated Salesforce-based Sage Live accounting program - and the distraction of an entirely new tax compliance process that needed to be built in the UK.

The Sage Accountants Cloud will deliver the online practice suite that has been hanging in the air for so long and more, promised Sage product management vice president Nick Goode. When it arrives in the autumn, the package will include Sage One-compatible systems for final accounts, corporation tax - and routines to file quarterly updates and (both) end of year submissions for Making Tax Digital. It will also provide a practice overview of all these systems, incorporating data from Sage 50c Accounts clients, bankfeeds and external accounting systems including Xero.

When it comes to MTD, Sage now has a dedicated product marketing manager - Michael Office. “We are going to make sure all Sage customers are compliant for MTD, without additional spend, and we will make it extremely easy for them to fulfil,” he told AccountingWEB.

The Sage One MTD solution was on show at Sage’s MTD stand in a corner of the exhibition hall and drew a steady stream of visitors who wanted to see how it worked. “We’re going through extensive customer testing and validation with customers and partners and we will be led by their needs,” said Office.

“We will also work very closely with accountants, so whatever we build will be good enough for the end user and at the other end for the accountant and how they interact with shoebox clients. We don’t want taking pictures of receipts with a mobile phone to be the only strategy.”

Office was aware of the End of Period Statement stipulated in the draft Finance Bill for MTD and spoke of how he was liaising with HMRC to track any changes in detailed requirements. “Some of the detail is coming out of HMRC and some of the detail is starting to change,” he said.

One of the complications holding back product delivery for Sage was that as HMRC designs the process, it is tweaking things along the way, which complicates the picture software developers. Sage will spend more time thinking through some of the complications and testing its approaches in customer workshops.

During meetings with the tax department, Office said Sage was bringing pressure to bear to simplify online compliance. “We need to make sure we can bring [MTD] alongside some of the other submissions customers are making - the final end of year return including post-period adjustments, VAT stuff, and other paperwork customers might have to file,” he said.

“We believe we might be able to lobby HMRC to bring these things together.”

Replies (1)

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blue sheep
By NH
06th Apr 2017 17:11

Interested to see how the bank feeds management side works, that is certainly one big issue for us. The clients for whom we are able to control the bank feed process are much easier and quicker to deal with.

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