Why Convert from Sage 50 to QuickBooks?

 

Sage 50 is an easy-to-use desktop accounting software for growing small businesses, but is scalable to perform big business accounting. QuickBooks is an accounting software app that pioneered the use of windows that look like real-life forms. It offers most features every business will need.

With QuickBooks Pro, users can input bills, write checks, and post debit transactions easily. The Write Checks function helps new or inexperienced users by offering a familiar interface to input the transaction, while more experienced users have other options that allow faster entry, while still capturing the necessary information.

Bank reconciliations – The software makes reconciling bank and credit card statements easy

Customizable Chart of Accounts and classes – Users and take advantage of the highly customizable Chart of Accounts and Class feature to categorize income and expenditures and produce reports that are valuable to them. You are only really limited by how much detail you want to input to the transactions.

With Sage50, the out of the box reports are not appealing and take a bit to clean up during the end of the month. The set up of the reports can be quite tedious and not very intuitive. Much work is needed to add the drop and drag tool in a more visible way so that it is easy for the end user.

Sage needs to add the ability for the users (in a controlled environment) to manipulate the look and feel of the input screens. It gives you minimal options to add fields to certain areas.

The help feature does not satisfy the type of intelligence that allows you to search on phrases. If it is not exact, it does not do a very good job of filtering through items that you really don not need.

Although Sage is truly a great tool for manufacturing and can handle a million dollar business easily, it would not be recommended for large organizations requiring time tracking or revenue recognition.

QuickBooks starts from QuickBooks SimpleStart to Enterprise level solutions. The most popular for small businesses are SimpleStart and QuickBooks Pro. SimpleStart is suitable for cash businesses as it doesn’t have purchase ledge functionality, as Pro is still relatively cheap and is highly recommended.

Sage has many built in reports and a report tool where you can build your own reports. The main annoyances of these are that it is not easy to pull out data to compare by month or quarter all on one report, and the report builder does take a lot of training to use effectively. The Sage technical support desk is excellent. The knowledge of the technical team is very good and most issues are resolved quickly. The downsides are the long telephone system to get through and at peak times you can be waiting for a while to get through.

QuickBooks has very good functionality in its reporting tool and is easy to use, it is easy to pull out data over different periods and sort it in various ways.