Sage creates serious accounting software. They understand the needs of small business owners, and many say they are Intuit's only major competitor. Do not let the price tag of the DacEasy Complete Edition dissuade you from considering this accounting software for your small business. This edition is a great value since it includes five powerful modules: Accounting, order Entry, Job Costing Payroll and the Business Center. It also comes with Point of Sale (POS) software and one year of tax updates and Sage Business Care Gold Support. Usually tax information, POS software and premium support are not included as part of an accounting package and cost extra.
We commend Sage for continually improving this software; the newest version of DacEasy includes some serious improvements in usability. This accounting software now has workflow guides that help make 16 common processes easier, including payroll, shipping, sales and banking. Sage also increased the performance ability of DacEasy while running on Windows 7 64-bit. They also updated their invoice entry forms, data fields, payment processing and more.
When we downloaded this accounting software, we noticed that it included accounting, payroll, order entry, POS, job costing and crystal reports. However, we did not see job costing available as a workflow option. We asked Sage about this and they said it is included but you have to access it separately. However, we found this to be only a minor inconvenience.
Sage posts volumes of helpful information online including a release guide for DacEasy 2011.5. Sage also offers year-end assistance to all license holders, which includes help with payroll, end of month reports, order entry and POS help. The complete edition comes with one of the best support package you can obtain from Sage, which is their Business Care Gold Plan. This plan comes with mid-version upgrades, service pack updates, unlimited toll-free telephone support and 15 percent off additional purchases. This service also comes with access to Tech Tuesday and Business-Building Sage Business Care workshops. Tech Tuesday gives you an opportunity to interact with speakers, consultants and product experts. The Business-Building workshops are webcasts that cover a variety of topics such as maximizing the use of your Sage software and general business topics such as best hiring practices and management advice. If you need additional assistance, you can hire a Sage certified consultant for one-on-one support.
The Customers and Sales section of this accounting software provide ways for you to manage quotes, invoices, payments, back orders and sales returns. Through this module you can easily create invoices and edit customer accounts.
The Vendors and Purchasing section of this software includes ways to manage purchase orders, pay bills and edit vendor profiles. Here you can also perform purchase returns and back up your files. Though DacEasy reports on their website that you can create customized invoices and purchase orders, we only found ways to alter the content of the invoices and PO’s rather than the appearance such as font or color.
DacEasy has a comprehensive payroll module that can easily manage tasks such as calculating hourly, salary, vacation and sick pay. It can also track up to 12 custom fields and up to 30 unique earning and deduction fields. This makes it easy for you to track items exclusive to your company such as 401K, health care, parking or cafeteria plans unique to your company or per employee.
In terms of inventory you can track a variety of information including general, purchasing, sales, billing and custom information about an inventory item. This software can also track location, including in more than one warehouse. In terms of details, it can even keep track of weights and sizes, and it supports images.
In the Banking and Financial section of DacEasy you can manage receipts, make payments, void checks, reconcile accounts, backup data and view the cash ledger. We found this section rather simplistic compared to what it says it can do online, but sometimes less is more when it comes to making software as easy to use as possible.
DacEasy time billing is integrated into their job cost module. Here you can track time spent on projects, enter employee time sheets, create estimates and track completion dates. You can also invoice and manage regular and overtime hours spent on a project.
This accounting software has a good job costing module that can manage time and resources spent on a project. It can also create estimates, enter bids and invoices. DacEasy also has useful tools for budgeting job costs, for example you can set percentages for cost plus pay for employees and apply a burden rate to cost categories.
Though the general ledger is a valuable tool still used for performing audit checks and journal checks, we are noticing that new accounting programs still include them, but not as their top selling feature. Same is true for DacEasy. It has a general ledger for tracking journal entries, but it also offers a variety of other ledgers for tracking other features. For example, it offers basic reports plus cash ledgers, inventory journals, sales journals and more.
DacEasy now has ways to manage fixed assets through its accounting module. It can keep track of things like descriptions, location, department, serial number and more. It can also track original value, depreciation, book value and salvage values of an item.
Beyond just updating or importing accounting information in CSV form it can also integrate with Microsoft Office products and reports can be published as HTML pages. DacEasy can also easily export data in text or ASCII format.
Most accounting programs can run reports, but DacEasy does a little than just run a simple black and white report. Its Instant Report tool allows you to create quick reports that have the ability to be clicked on for more detail. For example, if you create a report with invoices you can click on a selected invoice to view the invoice detail.
The reports are also compatible with Office products so they can be exported to Word, Excel or PDF. Reports can even be created in a webpage compatible format to be published to your website or company blog. Of course it can also send reports to individual email accounts or in a batch email campaign.
DacEasy Complete Edition is truly a complete business solution. It can handle everything from accounting to payroll to POS, more than what most packages in this genre include. We like that they include their Gold service plan with DacEasy; this shows to us that Sage is invested in helping you not only optimize their software but also improve how you run your business.
