Sage 50cloud Accounting

Sage 50 is rock-solid from an accounting perspective. It also has very good built-in reporting, as well as the ability to integrate with very customizable and advanced reporting tools

It is not quite as user friendly for non-accounting professionals as other solutions, and the "cloud" functionality is not reliable.

Sage 50 is an easy-to-use piece of accounting software aimed at SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), and it is one of QuickBooks' major competitors.

It's fairly easy to find people who are familiar with Sage 50. That's a plus for small businesses looking to find an employee or outside service provider to take care of their books.

If you are looking to do the books yourself, Sage 50 is relatively easy to learn. They have thorough tutorials available to walk you through the basics.

Major transactions are grouped together under tabs on the left-hand navigation panel. The various workflows--receivables, payables, inventory and services, employees and payroll, and a 'company' category--are all shown graphically. Each task within a major area is represented as a labeled icon, making it is to start a new transaction from this screen. The 'company' link is a catch-all category, including general journal entries, the chart of accounts and tools for managing your data and accounting tasks.

Virtually every report that a small business could need is available in Sage 50.

I found Sage 50 to be glitchy in the past. I have spent too many hours on hold or on a call with their tech support.

I use the payroll-included version of Sage 50. I also have a support package. In all, that's not competitively priced. If it weren't for the fact that some clients have been using this software for years and are reimbursing me for the cost of the software, I would not be using it. QuickBooks is a better value.

Generally speaking, Sage 50cloud Accounting is easy to use, assuming you have an accounts background and know where everything is supposed to go. If you have never used Sage software before it will benefit you to take a short online course to learn the basics. It is easy to implement and setup, with no special requirements, and integrates well with our Order Management system, our banking and HMRC.

I feel like the software really needs to make use of a SQL/No-SQL based database system rather than the flat file-based system that it currently uses. If you are a very small business then you won't notice but we sit just at a level where the next size up of Sage product is too big. Using Sage 50cloud is frustrating once the amount of data reaches a certain size as it causes issues with performance.