Sage 50cloud Accounting (formerly Sage 50 Accounting) is accounting software designed for small businesses. Sage 50cloud Accounting (formerly Sage 50, and formerly Peachtree) lets businesses invoice customers, pay bills, manage inventory, control costs, and pay employees. The solution includes high-level dashboards and in-depth reports.
$61.92
per month per user
Xero
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Sage 50
Xero
Editions & Modules
Sage 50 Pro Accounting
$61.92
per month
Sage 50 Premium Accounting
$103.92
per month per user
Sage 50 Quantum Accounting 3 User
$177.17
per month per user
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sage 50
Xero
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Annual billing plans also available for all products.
Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
Xero lacks the AR invoice payment processing capability of all the titles listed above. I view Xero as an application for Mom and Pop grocery stores where sophisticated, business critical software isn't a requirement. As a small manufacturing business, in my opinion, the lack …
Sage at the time we moved to Xero did not really have a suitable Cloud offering and the full SaaS solution it did have was only applicable to very small businesses. Quickbooks was very similar to Xero but during testing, most users preferred Xero for various reasons. Xero's UI …
Ignoring pricing, Xero is among the best options available. It has the most complete feature set along with Quickbooks. It is more user-friendly compared to most of its competitors. It has well-designed mobile apps that can actually do something in contrast with most …
Sage 50 Accounts is well-suited for small to medium-sized enterprises, where there is a moderate number of expenses and invoices that need processing, typically by a company with a smaller finance team. Sage 50 is probably less suitable for a large organisation that needs to handle a higher volume of transactions and manage significant stock levels.
I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.
We can build "templates" for recurrent charges/invoices. This saves some time and also ensures that we always use the right accounting rubric.
A lot of additional information can be filled out such as client information (name, address, ...) which makes the software a little more complete.
If you don't need an updated version every year (my case) then the software is not too expensive. The pro version that I'm using was just a little over $300.
I really like the banking statement consolidation which allows you to ensure you got the right information registered.
Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.
Sage 50 could use some improvement in the Invoicing Module to allow for more flexibility in the design of the Invoice fields. The report customization tools could use some upgrading for easier use.
Fixed assets management module needs to be included with unlimited number of fixed assets.
Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.
I use this rating simply because I have a thriving Sage 50 consulting practice and will continue to keep my expertise in the product. I have consulted on both Sage 50 and QuickBooks for over 25 years so I have to maintain expertise in the solution as well as accounting and verticals.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
I think Sage 50 is a trusted product and is reliable from a product delivery and support perspective. They have deep domain expertise in the non-profit space and should be a consideration for new non-profit startups or existing non-profits looking to migrate from other platforms. Overall, I believe that Sage 50 does many things well with few limitations.
As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
They were very knowledgeable of the product, understood my timeline was limited for a software issue and allowed me to get back to my day to day work. The dial into your computer is great so you can monitor what they are doing and learn some tricks yourself
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
We implemented Sage 50 Premium Accounting in house, not using any third party or professional service. It was a relatively trouble free process, but can be tricky. Just read all instructions carefully, especially if you need to load the program on a network with more than one user
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
As we did the conversion almost 10 years ago it is hard to answer this question. At the time it was the ease of being able to produce both cash and accrual financial statements and reporting that led us to pick Sage
Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.
I define scalable from two perspectives; 1) the scalability to handle more bookkeepers/accountants using the product, and 2) the scalability to handle increasing customer/vendor/employee and transactional data. Sage 50 does a good job on both fronts. From the single users operating a micro-business accounting for customer invoices and bill payments only, to the multi-staff, multi-location, multi-departmental complex transactional operation. Although Sage 50 is quite expensive for that smallest user, it is quite inexpensive for the larger business entity. So, for the new enterprise expecting rapid growth, Sage 50 is the application of choice.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
Sage definitely needs to do a better job with customer service. I have had to use them only a handful of times and it was not a great experience but not the worse I've seen. They didn't make us a priority and I felt that they didn't have a sense of urgency. They did address my lack of satisfaction and I can see that they are at least aware of the issues and they are trying to correct them.
Sage is exactly what we need in my current organization and I wouldn't change it for another system. I have used quite a few in my lifetime and I would say that it fits our needs.
Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.
