Is it time to move on from Sage Accounts?

I’m sure I’m setting myself up to be in the firing line of the Sage lovers of this world, with this article. Given though, the same questions and frustrations keep appearing for our customers around Sage, I thought I’d weigh in with my thoughts on this.

For a little context here, as a business, we used to use Sage Accounts. This was off the back of a recommendation from our accountants that it was the only choice. We used Sage for a number of years, and it was ok. For me, it felt like it was designed for accountants, not for real-world business owners who just wanted to easily track finances. After battling through many VAT returns and year ends with it, it was time to move on. There were many reasons for this. The main reason being that our selected Cloud-based software would reduce the amount of admin required from twenty hours a month to less than two. That was down to just one feature (of which there were many) which would pull in data from our bank to the software. Another was the easy reporting and overview dashboard, which even a non-accounts person like me could easily understand. All of sudden I know pretty much where the finances of the business are, on any given day which just a few clicks.

We still see Sage in use, for many of our customers. The frustrations we see range from simply having to install the software to use Sage (whereas with a Cloud-based product, you just access it from any web browser), to not being able to use the latest version because Sage isn’t compatible with certain versions of Microsoft Windows Server.

The compatibility thing is a real gripe for me (on behalf of our customers), given it won’t run on Microsoft Windows Server Essentials – which is perfect for small businesses that have a requirement for an onsite server of some description. As Server Essentials is aimed at less than 25 users, and the licensing is really, really cheap compared to having a full Windows Server license, along with the Client Access Licenses, it’s commonplace in the SME World.

With Sage not supporting this product, it means that businesses who want to use the latest version of Sage, need an alternate solution to move forward.

The realistic options for these businesses are:

• Have an alternate device to act as the ‘Sage Server’, such as a well-configured Windows 10 computer, that is fully backed up
• Stay on an older version of Sage Accounts (which isn’t a good place to be)
• Have a new server installed, which is compatible (can be expensive, with little benefit if it’s just for a few people to use Sage)
• Switch to a new provider for your accounts software

Switching to a new provider might feel like it will be a huge pain, but it needn’t be. If you time it around your financial year-end, for example, you could finish off the previous year in Sage Accounts, then start fresh in your selected new software. You can retain Sage to refer back to, for the time being, knowing going forward all the new stuff is in the new software. That’s exactly what we did, and didn’t look back. We didn’t need access to Sage for very long, after a few months, there was simply no need to go back into it.

Having switched over from Sage Accounts, we can highly recommend that you check out FreeAgent, which has amazing reporting, saves you so much time and effort, and they have great support included as part of you using the product.

To summarise, don’t just assume Sage is the only for your business, and don’t be scared of a transition to something else. With careful planning, it needn’t be a big deal.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions Ltd, a Cloud Services and IT Consultancy business in Redditch, Worcestershire. They used to used Sage.