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
ZipBooks
Score 7.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ZipBooks is an accounting software solution for small business owners and accountants. Users can track expenses, manage their team, send recurring invoices and manage projects.
$0
Pricing
Sage 50cloud Accounting
ZipBooks
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
ZipBooks Starter
$0
ZipBooks Smarter
$15
ZipBooks Sophisticated
$35
ZipBooks Accountant
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sage 50cloud Accounting
ZipBooks
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Annual traditional plan with license, monthly, and annual subscription plans available.
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.
ZipBooks is really strong for small businesses (and non-profits like the ones I help manage). It may not yet be ready to handle medium or large businesses given the deep, niche functionality that is sometimes required in those cases.
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
Invoicing is particularly easy-to-use, quick, clean and beautiful. GREAT for branding.
The time tracker was unexpected, but very useful and integrates well with the invoicing. Leads to quick invoicing every time.
Customer support is phenomenal -- the support staff is friendly and helpful.
Although they are a new company, they are definitely on the right track!
I recommend this software to clients, colleagues, and friends alike, mostly for it quick and beautiful invoicing.
They do what they can to live up to their name! It doesn't take very long to get set up, or very long to create a complete invoice and send it to the right person.
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.
There is some difficulty with a need to learn the use of the menus, they are not open and click, at the moment, the user needs to open the menu then using the pad keys scroll down and use enter to select from the drop-down menu. A mouse does not work.
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.,
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.
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
I've primarily compared ZipBooks vs. Quickbooks because I've used Quickbooks at larger companies before. ZipBooks was the right fit for a smaller organization because it still had all the core features of Quickbooks but at a dramatically lower price that fits the budget.
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.
ZipBooks is entirely affordable, and with my current $15/mo payments, I get ROI pretty quickly.
Invoices are simple and easy to make, while staying beautiful and functional at the same time. This saves me TIME, which means that I don't need to spend 15-20 minutes fiddling with the software to make it do what I want it to do. It just works. And that means, I can spend more time doing client work, and managing projects and sales.
