Small Business Accounting Software

June 1st, 2011

I’ve recently been doing some rather detailed research into some of the accounting products which are available on the market today. Not so much from the features aspect, as to be fair any software on the market, simply must be capable of doing the fundamental tasks required or it just would not sell. What I have been looking into though are some of the additional benefits which are increasingly bundled into the latest products, Sage 50 Accounts Professional being a great example, and also the pricing differences between suppliers, what one will provide over another and delivery timeframes.

Firstly I did look at how widely all the products were used, such as MYOB and Quickbooks, however to be fair, most companies do seem to either use Sage, Spreadsheets or their Accountant does the whole thing, and yes, you guessed it, almost every accountant also seems to use Sage, so I’m afraid this review is going to be unintentionally rather biased towards that UK software giant form Newcastle. That being said, it does make a refreshing change to have a dominant force in any technology sector which is a truly British company.

So, firstly features, any package will have a nominal ledger, sales and purchase ledgers, invoicing abilities and bank reconciliations, without these features the product would be of little use to anyone, however if you look at the higher end products they do also incorporate other additional features, these include full POP, job costing, stock systems and a number of 3rd party add-ons which can (apparently) be integrated by the user in most cases.

When it comes to the pricing things get a bit odd. Sage themselves run an online shop and sell everything direct to the public, however this is at the recommended retail prices. They also have a huge network of Partners and Accountants all around the country who resell the products. The strangest thing here is that they are consistently much cheaper than their vendor. For example you can buy the top level Sage Line 50, to use it’s old name or Sage 50 Accounts Professional, with or without Sage Cover, which is technical support supplied directly by Sage from about £750 from some of the resellers, but Sage sell it direct for over £1000.

At the other end of the scale and retailing at over £550, you can find the basic Sage 50 Accounts product for well under £400 from some resellers, this in some cases even includes delivery and invoices and somewhat ironically 45 days of free sage cover too.

The upshot is that if you want to buy any of their software, because this doesn’t just apply to the accounting software, the Sage forecasting and  payroll software etc is all cheaper too, it’s well worth having a look at what the resellers can offer. Also with them all delivering it in the same time, or sometimes even quicker than the vendor them-self can do, it’s not a bad option.

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