SAGE Accounts Production v Relate

cal60

Cant find any recent threads on comparisons between these products. Has anybody recommendations as to the choice of product particularly around the timeliness and quality of formats for small limited companies ?

dbran

Hi

I have not used Sage accounts production for a number of years but I remember it was far too easy for a lazy junior to overwrite the formula with figures. Also being a UK product the irish market was not always their major concern.

We use relate for the last few years and for the most part it works fine.

dbran

lakill Farm

e were going to go to Relate back a few years ago but decided to stay with Sage apex

Synode

dbran wrote: »

Also being a UK product the irish market was not always their major concern.

Sage have a massive presence in Ireland. Why do you say it's a UK product?

duffysfarm

Synode wrote: »

dbran wrote: »

Also being a UK product the irish market was not always their major concern.

Sage have a massive presence in Ireland. Why do you say it's a UK product?

Its a uk product that is tailored slightly to the irish market. Any market it has is due to the amount of money it spends on advertising. If it spent as much on priduct development then they would do a lot better.

dbran

Hi

It is a UK/International product. They may have a presence in Ireland but their main focus is UK. The entire Irish market for them would be less then the size of Birmingham.

So they will not be putting the same level of resources into product development, legislative updates etc. tailored for the Irish market as they would for the UK market.

That is my opinion gained from people who have used sage accounts production and no longer do.

Kind Regards

dbran

duffysfarm

and if you think Sage is bad then try MYOB/Viztopia....
I have used Relate for a good few years now and while not perfect I think its the best available. support and updates are very good

dbran

Grrrr...CCH VIZtopia drove me mad.

I think the time they shipped the UK directors report instead of the Irish one in a long overdue update a few years ago gave me the impression that they did not care enough about their Irish customers to check to see if what they were sending out was right.

Their update for the CA 2014 was a complete joke and it was then that we decided to move to relate.

I believe that they are rolling out a completely new product over the last year so perhaps they have got a bit more of a handle on things since then.

dbran

cal60

We have used Sage for a long time and are sorely tempted to move to Relate but the main thing holding me back is the fact that the Relate formats are not editable at all ? That means putting a lot of trust in their ability to produce fully accurate formats.

Relate claim a lot of people have moved over to them in the last few years but there must still be a reasonable number of people using Sage otherwise they would hardly be continuing to offer/develop Irish Co formats.

PS - sorry about the delay in acknowledging your replies - I thought I would get email notifications on watched threads but for some reason I didn't

exaisle

Sorry for hijacking this fairly old thread....I'm wondering if anybody can tell me if there's a difference in cost betwee Sage Accounting Production onsite (networked) and offsite (non-networked) licences?

fankity flank

cal60 wrote: »

We have used Sage for a long time and are sorely tempted to move to Relate but the main thing holding me back is the fact that the Relate formats are not editable at all ? That means putting a lot of trust in their ability to produce fully accurate formats.

Relate claim a lot of people have moved over to them in the last few years but there must still be a reasonable number of people using Sage otherwise they would hardly be continuing to offer/develop Irish Co formats.

PS - sorry about the delay in acknowledging your replies - I thought I would get email notifications on watched threads but for some reason I didn't

I find the Relate formats pretty editable where you want them to be, and reassuringly fixed where you want them to be!

If there is some wording that you can't change then you could always print to MS Word and manually edit OR (which is my preference) save to PDF and edit through Adobe or other PDF writer.

cal60

I've used Relate now for 12 months or so but have to say Im finding the fixed nature of the formats hard to fully like.

In relation to them being editable, as far as I can see it is really only text elements on the page that are "editable" directly (rather than having to go into the compliance database) and not the actual layout etc.

The licencing also seems to be more restrictive i.e. SAGE defines users as concurrent users ( in other words three people could use the system so long as they are not all logged in at the same time) whereas Relate seem to operate on a named licence basis (each individual user needs a licence)

I'm wondering whether anybody having used Relate has felt the need to go back to SAGE or similar ?