Yuck

[flick]

Bloody hell, Sage is a pile of shite, isn't it? It's horribly put together. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

This entry was originally posted at http://flick.dreamwidth.org/850228.html, where it has

Comments

[ms_cataclysm]

Yes, it is. I love the 1980s but I don't wish to relive them at work.

[flick]

Annoyingly, I now realise that there was absolutely no reason for me to use Sage: it almost would have been quicker for me to brown-paper-bag it, as I had to go through every transaction and check it was in the right period / account line; and the parent company doesn't actually use Sage, or want anything other than a monthly P&L and BS from me. So I could have just used something sensible, that can actually do things like deal with online banking and actually produce a monthly P&L.

Bah.

[ms_cataclysm]

free xero trial ? or would that be cheating ?

[flick]

Not really a viable long term solution, sadly. Given the likely lifespan of the company, I suspect a Xero subscription would have been cheaper!

[ceemage]

You could always go back to keeping everything in an Excel spreadsheet. Or (for ultimate retro cool points) 13-column analysis paper.

[flick]

Or I could go *forwards* and use an actually-usable piece of software....

(Personally, I prefer 6-column, or eight. 13 column always ends up with the holes punched in an inconvenient place!)

[whotheheckami]

What system do you like?

[flick]

tbh, the only ones I've used recently are Freshbooks (good if you just want to send and receive a few invoices every month: I recommend it for smallish sole traders and the like, although the purple envelopes are also a good service) and Xero, which I think is fabulous: it does everything that Sage does, as well as doing basic fixed assets and payroll, it's user friendly, it's sensible, it produces useful reports, you can use it at any level from very basic (with optional 'give your accountant an account for year end" mode) up to proper company accounts.... The only thing that it doesn't do that I would like is the ability to set a journal to automatically release a prepayment over n months. But then, Sage doesn't do that either, unless you pay an extra couple of hundred pounds....

Both SaaS, which has the added advantage of being usable away from the office, being backed up, having good support where they can actually look at the problem, etc.

[ms_cataclysm]

you can do repeating and reversing journals in vt but you don't get bank feeds.

[evil_mogwai]

Sage is only good if you have a humongous business to deal with.

Also it depends on which version. I once worked somewhere where one division is on Sage 50 and another on Sage 100.... Totally different and a total nightmare especially to output current ledgers for credit control >.

[dougs]

Sage is, indeed, just awful. I'm fortunate that I never have to train people in it (their accountants tend to do that), but I often have to sort out the dreadful mess it makes of its back-end data structures.