Now that you're your own boss, have you discovered that you spend more time working than you did when you worked for someone else? Small business owners often wear many hats − you are HR, sales, accounting and the warehouse. Furthermore, when things go wrong everyone comes knocking at your door. Sage understands small businesses and can help you keep your accounting straight and customers satisfied.
Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting has yet again surpassed the challengers by releasing their 2012 version ahead of everyone else. This accounting software can conquer advanced inventory requirements as well as complex job costing. It can manage your vendors, payroll, reports, cash flow and online banking. Sage can easily become your best business partner, and yet again Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting brushes off the competition and takes our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award.
No matter how much you enjoy your small company, you likely never feel like you have enough time on the golf course, at the beach or with your family. Year-end taxes can be a surreal nightmare that pulls you away from the things you really want to do, like meeting new clients or snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. Sage can end your accounting nightmares and organize your business details so you can spend less time fretting and more time with your fretless guitar.
Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting includes all the modules you need to run your business in one package. The included modules are:
- Customers & Sales
- Vendors & Purchases
- Inventory & Services
- Employees & Payroll
- Banking
New features for 2012:
- The ability to copy transactions, including invoices, quotes, proposals and purchase orders
- The Sage Advisor, which helps you learn about the software and access business resources
- Improved reporting and analysis with Sage Peachtree Business Intelligence
- A Vendor Management Center for easily tracking vendor information
- A Sage Peachtree System Check that helps monitor software issues to decrease conflicts and downtime
Sage understands that even though you may run your own company, you are likely not an accountant. As the easiest to use accounting software, Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting does not use complex accounting terms and yet it has the journals, ledgers and reports that your accountant needs. It even has an audit trail tool the can help detect errors and track transaction history.
The software is presented in workflow format so you can quickly perform routine processes. For example, you can easily start by creating a quote and converting that quote to a sales order. After you make the sale you can convert the sales order to an invoice and add finance charges and terms, and then receive the money and make your deposit. The entire process is clearly organized in a logical workflow path.
Like most accounting software at this level, high-touch support requires a support subscription. Sage offers monthly and yearly support as well as three levels of their Sage Business Care plan. Their monthly plan includes telephone, email and chat support and access to their online support library. The yearly plan includes the monthly support options plus Excel support, data recovery, password retrieval and study guides. The Business Care plans include their Silver, Gold and Platinum plans that offer a variety of support options including upgrades, product and service discounts, unlimited support and online training. They also offer training courses via Sage University; one year of access to over 125 topics costs $229.
Other support options include their knowledgebase, embedded support, the Sage forum, the Year-End Center and the Accounting 101 Center. In terms of social media, you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook, but they do not offer support through these sites, just company news and information. Since Sage is such a popular accounting tool, you can also find numerous blogs and Twitter accounts held by Sage users. Though Sage does not support third-party sources, they can prove quite helpful.
The receivable section for Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting is in their Customers & Sales module. Through this control panel, you can manage customers, jobs, time and expenses. You can also easily create quotes and invoices and make deposits. New to the 2012 version is the ability to copy any transaction, so you can easily create a new invoice or quote based on a previous version. To get a bird's eye view of receivables you can view a pie chart of aged receivables and you can quickly view aged receivables, transaction, sales journal, invoice register and cash receipt reports.
Peachtree's accounts payable section is powerful but simple; you can manage vendors, write checks, enter bills, void checks and process credits and returns. You cannot create custom checks per vendor. You can only make global changes that affect the layout and color of all checks. But this feature is only a minor, cosmetic omission that has little to do with keeping your vendors happy. They offer an online bill pay solution called Sage Peachtree Online Bill Pay that for a reasonable fee can electronically pay your bills.
We ran into fewer employee and payroll issues with 2012 than we did with the 2011 version, so they may have tweaked a few things for the better. This accounting software can store a wide variety of employee data including withholding information, custom fields, email addresses and even an image. Sage offers a payroll service that can calculate taxes and provide forms, which works seamlessly with this software.
In terms of inventory, Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting does just about everything we were looking to find, including tracking stock locations, re-order quantities, preferred vendors and the ability to manage assemblies. It can also sort by UPC or SKU, which is necessary if you use a scanner and UPC barcodes for identifying stock. The quick overview shows inventory items, reports and sales trends. We have been waiting for Sage to add an image option to inventory items, but currently you can only add an image file as an attachment.
With Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting you can write and void checks, make deposits and reconcile accounts. To set up direct deposit you have to use PeachSync, and like most programs, the direct deposit service requires a subscription. For accepting credit cards, they have a product called Sage Payment Solutions, which offers you the ability to accept credit card payments at the point of sale, online, by mail or telephone, or through a mobile device.
Within this section, you can create expense quotes, daily and weekly time tickets, and sales invoices. Time and expense tickets can manage information such as employee and customer IDs, activities, associated invoices, bill status and time. The time ticket also has a timer for clocking the billable time spent on a task.
The jobs module is in the Customers & Sales section. Here you can create, view and edit jobs. Job details that you can track include supervisor, customer information, custom fields, estimated expenses, projected due dates and job status. You can track the expense details with "phases." A phase is simply a "cost type" associated with a cost code and description. Though it takes a minute to set up, phases can help you quickly create estimates of routine tasks in the future.
Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting has an excellent General Ledger that your accountant will find useful. You can change accounting periods, make ledger entries and register accounts. There are seven reports available in this section including journal, ledger balance and income statement reports.
This business accounting software can manage up to 200 fixed assets. It can also calculate depreciation and provides tax-oriented reports. The Sage FAS, their tool for tracking fixed assets can manage assets from purchase to sale or disposal and can help you with managing the value of items in terms of estimated values for insurance reporting. If you need to track more than 200 items, Sage's complete version of FAS can manage over 10,000 assets and deprecation information for 300,000 IRS and GAAP rules.
Sage provides an easy-to-use conversion tool for converting from QuickBooks 2008-2010 (Pro through Enterprise) to Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting. Other versions and Quicken have to be converted manually by exporting data to a compatible file type in Excel.
Peachtree provides over 200 customizable reporting options, including Crystal Reports (as an additional option). You can choose the font style and size for your reports and you can customize every aspect of a form such as column widths, auto-fill instructions, font type and more. You can share reports by email, save them as a PDF file or export them to Excel.
Within the last year we have reviewed over 40 accounting solutions and continually Sage lands on top. This version is no exception. Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting is the best comprehensive all-in-one solution for small businesses. This software is easy to use even for non-accountants, and if your business keeps growing, Sage has accounting solutions that you can grow into. If your accounting is getting out of hand, it is time to get help. Sage can help you organize your business and present your company in a professional manner to your clients. With Sage business is good for everyone.
