Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing product, 15 Mar 2006
This review is from: Instant Accounts v11 (CD-ROM)
I’ve been using sage accounts for my small business for 4 years. To get beyond the very basics you need expensive and time-consuming training. My accountant recommended a simple spreadsheet accounting system, which I have been using for the last 4 months and I have to say, has been quite liberating. There are definitely better products out there and I would urge anyone looking for accounting software to avoid this product. Having said that, ‘Sages Payroll’ software is brilliant & I continue to use to this day.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Far from perfect, but probably the best bet, 1 Mar 2006
By A Customer
This review is from: Instant Accounts v11 (CD-ROM)
In almost every area of technical software there’s the “industry standard” software that professionals use, which has the downside of being relatively unfriendly to the casual user, and there’s other software that is more friendly and accessible to users, who often maintain strongly that it is “just as good” but which doesn’t meet professional needs. It’s the same here. The Sage family goes from the cheap “Instant” range as seen here and takes a similar look and feel right up the range to Line 100 which is used by companies turning over millions. Despite one good feature, from an accountant’s point of view, the competitors to Sage Instant are a pain in the neck. (And “no” to the cynics, that doesn’t mean the accountant is pleased to bill more, for sorting out the mess. That type of work is really hard to bill. The margin that accountants can charge on Sage is not enough to sway judgement either.) This version doesn’t attempt to do stock control. The “Products” features are for creating invoices. There are things about Sage that are not good, and the company is fairly “revenue hungry,” but I’d recommend this as the best of the accounting software bunch at this level.
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150 of 163 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A poor product made worse by a lousy report writer, 24 Mar 2005
This review is from: Instant Accounts v11 (CD-ROM)
I know that Sage is highly recommended by Accountants, but to my mind it is a very poor substitute for MYOB, Quickbooks or Access. Principally, transactions are not sorted in date order (only the date of entry), the Bank Reconciliation facility is a joke and essential reports (such as Nominal Ledger details) do not have a running balance. The first of these (not sorting in date order) is a considerable handicap. Often you need to examine transactions to a Nominal Account in order to answer a particular query. It also means you have to wait for the whole file to be scanned when producing, say, their pathetic version of a Bank Reconciliation. MYOB and Quickbooks allow you to reconcile any Nominal Ledger Account. This is extremely useful with, for example, PAYE Control, Net Payroll and other Control Accounts. Not so with Sage. I believe Sage needs to be completely rewritten in order to take advantage of new ideas of working. Why do the Sales and Purchase Ledgers require Account Codes whey they ought to be accessible alphabetically ( a failing that Access shares)? Why not have the ability to change the Nominal Ledger structure as you can with MYOB? Similar criticisms to the above also apply to the Payroll Package, it is tedious and cumbersome. Much better use Iris PayMaster; there is an excellent program that really helps those fearful of payroll. The only good thing about Sage is it is cheap, but cheap comes at its' own price. You have been warned! For the small business, try MYOB or Quickbooks. A much better choice.
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