Instant Accounts 10 Sage Review
Instant Accounts 10 Sage
Sage Accountancy Software Review
I am a Chartered Accountant with my own practice. When advising small businesses looking for their first computerised accounting package I will always recommend either Sage Instant Accounting or Quick Books. Both require an investment of time to learn (though we offer training) and, in my experience, which takes longest depends entirely on the individual. One, Sage, is written mostly in the language used by bookkeepers whilst the other, Quick Books, is written in laymen's language - albeit mostly in awful Americanisms. In my very wide experience, it is quite wrong to assume that this difference makes Quick Books easier to learn or easier to use. On balance I agree, and advise my clients accordingly, that Quick Books may present a friendlier interface to first timers, but anyone with previous experience of keeping books, in whatever form, mostly find Quick Books confusing and patronising.Looking at the other comments that have been made, I have to say to Dalcross that I would be worried about any accounting package that didn't replicate paper accounting on your computer and the plain fact is that Quick Books does this too but manages to heavily disguise the fact - something that I personally find a serious drawback and most certainly not a selling point. Getting information out of Sage is infinitely easier once you know how and it tends to do things in a much more logical way. I agree that getting logos on layouts has been a drawback (although fairly easily overcome with two passes of the document through the printer). Sage have addressed this in the latest versions of the more senior Line 50 and, if not already, one assumes the same will happen on Instant.
I'd like to think that Tom Finert is like the majority of my clients. He's so right about there being no quick fix. It's amazing the numbers who assume that the software will do it all for them without any investment of time and effort on their part at all. You must be prepared to pay for good training or study a good reference book.
Justin just sounds in bad temper about error messages that are probably more to do with his system than Sage. I have been using all versions of Sage for 15 years and I can not recall getting these kind of problems other than on systems that could not cope. As for support, I think Sage do currently charge too much for this so I willingly support my clients mostly for free - as an overhead. However, support for any software is rarely free so it is not as if Sage are particularly out of line by charging. It's just that they currently charge too much.
I do have a number of clients who swear by Quick Books but I have far more using Sage and do so very happily and efficiently. Any accounting package can take time to learn and usually, as with any software, the closer the package is to what an expert would want the harder it may be to learn. Once learned however the benefits become clear. I am no graphics expert and I found Adobe Photoshop totally unintuitive and extraordinarily hard to learn. I nearly gave up in desperation. But then I found some excellent training material and now I have invested the time I know it is the best in its class. I think the same is true of Sage. Stick with it and you will find it is better than Quick Books.