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.
$299
per year
Wave Accounting
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Wave Accounting is a free, cloud-based accounting platform exclusively for small businesses. It supports double-entry bookkeeping and permits unlimited user access, invoicing, and expense management. Wave Accounting integrates with Wave's invoicing, receipt scanning, payment processing and payroll apps.
N/A
Pricing
Sage 50cloud Accounting
Wave Accounting
Editions & Modules
Sage 50 Pro Accounting
$299
per year
Sage 50 Premium Accounting
$449
per year
Sage 50 Quantum Accounting 3 User
Starting at $1,499
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sage 50cloud Accounting
Wave Accounting
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Annual traditional plan with license, monthly, and annual subscription plans available.
Wave accounting does not have as many features as Quickbooks or Sage 50 but it holds it's own with the market it serves. I use Wave primarily for the payroll functionality and i have recommended that clients who use Sage 50 or Quickbooks use Wave for it's payroll. The importing …
Sage is great for portability and exchange with external accountants as it is widely used and people will be able to read your data in. It's a very good and complete solution for a little business where one person can handle all of the accounting. I doubt that it scales well to large companies with several in-house accountants working at the same time.
Wave Accounting was used for a small practice without a lot of the accounting considerations a large company would have. For the price, you really can't beat what Wave offers out of the box. All of the basic tools for things like invoicing and expenses are all easy to use. End of year accounting is easy with exports of data.
It has the capability of "Single Click" processes that allows you to turn Quotes into orders, instant invoicing and track A/R in the Order Screen
I can email Sales Orders directly to my Customer and also remind them of past due from a single screen. I can track Project, Closeouts, Over Seas order by setting up Jobs and clicking the job name in Order Entry.
You can use recurring entries and copy and paste on the P&L, using masking for department reporting and budgeting
You can use the BI feature and export into Excel in Pivot format and utilize Timeline and Slicer to see the company overall performance by months, day or years
Reconciliation is very difficult with multiple Wave transactions that need to be deleted or merged before it can be matched to a bank transaction.
Payroll worked fine for us but took several days to get it set up. We have switched to another bookkeeping system and another payroll system. Canceling with Wave took several days and they charge $6 for something even though the month was paid for in advance.
Credit card processing is nice and worked fine for us.
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.
I know that credit card processing is a way for Wave to make money, but I really wish they offered ACH payment on Invoices.
I do cash-based accounting, which means I have to make little journal entries at the start and end of each year to get my books to balance because Wave wants to do everything differently. This should just be a setting to flip, whether you want cash-based or accrual-based.
They use Yodlee for bank connection, which doesn't play nice with 2FA. Pretty much every time I log in I have to re-enter credentials, get a code sent to me, reauthenticate, and know that I'm going to have to do it again next week. Not really on Wave, but wish they could get it together nonetheless.
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.
Sage delivers what it promises. The whole accounting package is user friendly and can be easily picked up by a novice. The support is second to none. They always keep us abreast of new technologies and/or changes to accounting that would impact us. The range of reports fits both small and large companies.,
I am a professional bookkeeper and I have no problems using Wave and all of it's features. I can see that certain individuals who have no accounting knowledge might struggle with a few different features and entries, but that is why Wave has an emphasis in connecting users to Wave Pro's who will walk them through things
Wave does tend to slow down when filtering your transactions screen especially by date. This is more of an issue when trying to trouble shoot certain transactions or clean-up a set of books.
Although I have only needed to call tech support on three occasions through out the entire time of usage, each time my problem was quickly resolved by people who were obviously well trained and easy to understand. Sage 50 Premium Accounting is a reliable and "bug-free" product that is regularly improved upon.
I never had to call Wave Support as we barely experienced any support-related problems on our side. However, I do know a few people that complained about Wave support. It would be nice as well, though if they could have more in your face tutorials for new users or how-to videos should we struggle to do something
Sage 50 is a strong accounting software package. It will work efficiently if it is installed correctly. If one puts garbage in, one will get garbage out. Also it is important to train the staff to use Sage 50 properly. It is also important to set up security for each user.
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
Wave is FREE for most functions. Payment processing costs no matter where you go (as does payroll or taxes). Wave rises above tools like QuickBooks Online because they know that for our small firm, being nimble is the name of the game. We don't need exhaustive reporting and management like QB offers and we certainly don't want to pay for it
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.
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.
