Sage Accountants Club Price increases

catonbook

Has anyone else been emailed about the increase in the Sage Accountants Club premier service?

They have emailed me today to let me know that for 5 bureau Accounts and payroll software that they have increased the fee from £600 inc VAT to £1194.00 including VAT. They seem to be trying to increase the fee by £500 for no real benefits apart from quicker telephone answering. I do not use their accounts support line and only very rarely use their payroll support line. I obviously use their sage payroll update for legislative changes each year.

I work on my own and feel really cross with Sage as the cost is now getting unjustifiably high. Rip off merchants spring to mind! Sorry just getting that off my chest!

Is anyone else a member of their club? Or have any views on this? Or how does everyone else manage? Any advice would be gratefully received.

catonbook

Please could someone help!

Hi I would be grateful if anyone could let me know how they manager the cost of Sage burea licences for accounts and payroll. Or particularly for payroll is there better software out there?

I am new to posting on this forum so wondering whether I have done something wrong.

Thanks

Monsoon

Hi

In my opinion, Sage is overpriced and wholly unnecessary.

I use Solar Accounts (discount here) for bookkeeping and 12Pay (bureau) for payroll, and both have great customer support, including technical.

Both are single payment, multi company, unlike Sage which tie you in per client and excessively expensive service contracts that need to review each year.

Alternatively look at VT Transaction+ for bookkeeping, as this integrates nicely with VT Accounts production software which many accountants use.

catonbook

thanks for your reply

Hi Monsoon

Thanks for your reply.

How do you transfer the data from Sage to the other packages that you mention? Is it easy to do?

I always hand my work over for a practive accountant to prepare the year end accounts and tax returns. They keep telling me they prefer Sage but does it really make that much of a difference?

Monsoon

Depends on the accountant! I don't prefer Sage. I can work with it, but I'll take books in any decent accounting package.

Different software has different import functions. To be honest I think it's probably a pain to do; I would be inclined to switch at the end of a client's financial year, put in an opening trial balance and go from there, without trying to import anything. Having never had Sage in house, I've never had to transfer over.