Sage Accounts Production

Mol3636

Hi all, just looking for some advice. I am an accountant gone from practice to industry. Previouly i have used sage accounts production but am thinking of keeping with that in industry. It is a small company with 10 employees. I don't like sage line 50 in the sense that you cannot edit journals etc - everything has to be reversed and if you make a mistake there is always a trail. I will be the only one using it so i am not worried about tracking changes. Has anyone any thoughts - does anyone else out there use Sage accounts production in industry. Am i mad in thinking this, i just find sage accounts production so user friendly.

HcksawJimDuggan

The first issue that comes to mind with using accounts production in industry is the fact that there is no integration with a debtors or creditors ledger which would mean you would possibly have to maintain a manual one in excel. Creating a bit more work for yourself.

Sage line 50 will let you edit most journals through the correction function (although it appears as a reversal in the list of transactions once the edit is saved). I would see this as a positive rather than a negative though as it gives a clearer audit trail.

In my opinion, Sage accounts production is a glorified spreadsheet. Don't get me wrong, it's very useful for accountant's in practice using it to generate financial statements but for an accountant in industry, looking to maintain a debtors & creditors ledger and possibly a fixed asset register there's no comparison between the two.

dbran

Hi

As far as I recall Sage Accounts Production does have a limited debtors and creditors ledger which should be adequate for a small business wanting to keep a basic set of books.

It would of course not have the same level of functionality as Line 50 and I am sure at some stage you may find that you will need to upgrade. eg, can you email customer statements

Regards


dbran

HcksawJimDuggan

Ya it is very limited. There is an option to post supplier payments and customer reciepts but all it does is debits the expense & credits the bank (for supplier payments). Creditors & Debtor listing by supplier/customer cannot be generated and invoices would have to be posted by general journal. Seem's like alot of extra work to me.

Martin567

I would agree that Sage Accounts Production is unlikely to be suitable for your needs in the longer term for the reasons already mentioned.

I used Sage 50 quite a bit in the past although not so much recently. It is without doubt far more suitable than Accounts Production for use in industry although I admit I always used to find it a bit frustrating and annoying. As the OP said, correcting errors was always a bit of a pain. If you entered an incorrect code by mistake or posted a journal the wrong way round, you were forced to enter another journal to correct. I'm all for having a clear and complete audit trail but the above is not the way to achieve that. If you know immediately you've made an error and just want to correct it, you should be able to do so. Retaining a simple error in the audit trail forever only makes it more confusing when you try to review what's making up a particular balance.

Also, I recall the drilldown facility in Sage 50 as being very poor. You were forced to print off audit trail reports when it would have been much simpler to just drill down a couple of levels to the source transaction directly from the relevant nominal ledger account.

As I said, I haven't used Sage 50 in the last few years so these problems may not still exist. In my last job, I used Intact software which I thought was far superior, flexible and user friendly than Sage 50.

lakill Farm

when i was training i carried out some bookkeeping including debtors and creditors on sage apex accounts production (When you set it up you tick the bookkeeping box)

Now in my own business we use line50 and apex

trg

An old thread I know but just enquiring if it's possible to run multiple businesses on Sage Accounts Production?

E.g. a builder who also runs a farm....ideally you'd have 2 profit/loss statements and most likely 1 balance sheet.

Can't find the function at all so thought you might know

J.Ryan

trg wrote: »

An old thread I know but just enquiring if it's possible to run multiple businesses on Sage Accounts Production?

E.g. a builder who also runs a farm....ideally you'd have 2 profit/loss statements and most likely 1 balance sheet.

Can't find the function at all so thought you might know

It can be done, with some formatting and use of account groups, but, it takes a lot of time to get it right.

kennyb3

Never seen this first time around.

As mentioned - using the bookkeeping dataset option on Apex allows for debtor and creditors ledger.

What specific benefits would the same ledgers on Sage Line 50 have? (out of interest). Once you can enter invoices/credit notes/journals/get aged listings, what specifically would most require?

To me Sage Line 50 really comes into it's own in terms of stock, if of course it's dealt with and controlled properly - no such feature on Apex afaik. However Intact is a long way ahead of Sage Line 50 again in that regard.