Instant Accounts v11

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Editorial reviews

Product Description
AccountingComplete VAT managementDetailed customer/supplier recordsComprehensive invoicingPowerful reportingLinks to Instant PayrollInternet readySimple to upgradeIncludes euro exchange rate calculator to accurately convert euro transactio

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2006-03-15 rating:
Disappointing product
I’ve been using sage accounts for my small business for 4 years. To get beyond the very basics you need expensive and time-consuming training. My accountant recommended a simple spreadsheet accounting system, which I have been using for the last 4 months and I have to say, has been quite liberating. There are definitely better products out there and I would urge anyone looking for accounting software to avoid this product. Having said that, ‘Sages Payroll’ software is brilliant & I continue to use to this day.

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review by: date: 2006-03-09 rating:
Sage - The best, and there's no getting away from it
Sage are the only surviving British software company on the FTSE 100. Turning over £700m --> comparible to Norwich Union. They have got this far because the products are rubbish. They are functionally excellent and provide the platform for companies so that they can grow with their business, i.e. moving from Instant to Line 50 and Line 50 to MMS etc.

Sage haven't got to where they are because Instant is rubbish!

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review by: date: 2006-03-01 rating:
Far from perfect, but probably the best bet
In almost every area of technical software there’s the “industry standard” software that professionals use, which has the downside of being relatively unfriendly to the casual user, and there’s other software that is more friendly and accessible to users, who often maintain strongly that it is “just as good” but which doesn’t meet professional needs.

It’s the same here. The Sage family goes from the cheap “Instant” range as seen here and takes a similar look and feel right up the range to Line 100 which is used by companies turning over millions.

Despite one good feature, from an accountant’s point of view, the competitors to Sage Instant are a pain in the neck. (And “no” to the cynics, that doesn’t mean the accountant is pleased to bill more, for sorting out the mess. That type of work is really hard to bill. The margin that accountants can charge on Sage is not enough to sway judgement either.)

This version doesn’t attempt to do stock control. The “Products” features are for creating invoices.

There are things about Sage that are not good, and the company is fairly “revenue hungry,” but I’d recommend this as the best of the accounting software bunch at this level.

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review by: anthony9904 date: 2006-02-08 rating:
Dont waste your money and more importantly time
The program is little better than a paper based system. In theory it can out preform other programs and is totally customizable. However one would need advanced financial and programming knowledge to get sage to produce even the most basic of reports. Other programs will knock up over 100 reports within a couple of minutes. It could take 2 days to program sage to produce a single report. Most accountants tell me just to export the figures into excel to manipulate them. I ask why duplicate work, surely the accounts program should do the work.

Data entry is extremely slow and monotonous with sage lacking even the most basic programming concepts to make life easier.

In a nut shell sage is barely more effective than using a pen and paper and although with advanced programming it could produce reports that are highly customised, the amount of time it would take would be akin to using pen and paper in the first place.

Small business's need to get financial information out of their accounts system easily. Sage will record the data ( albiet slowly ) but when it comes to analysing and returning meaningful business information, you are on youre own.

On the plus side sage is so simple mistakes are hard to make. 90% of accountants recommend it (probably because its the only program 90% of accountants have ever used)


review by: amazon24099 date: 2006-01-21 rating:
The chocolate teapot in accounting software!
I have never used a piece of software with such appalling instructional design. It's horrible to use and requires the support service from Sage to simply get started. One of the previous reviews says that:

'The bad reviews are probably from people who have not had a great deal of experience with accounts software and I can fully understand their dislike of Sage, as it is not the most intuitive of programs... etc.'

We are completely computer literate using far more complicated layout and CAD software, and my book keeper has been in the business for over 10 years using various accounting software and it still reduces us to tears using it! We actually have to run other software solutions alongside Sage to make it do the most simple of operations.

We are now looking for more effective accounting solutions than sage and seriously considering an abacus!!

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Similar categories

Software . Categories . Business & Office . All Business & Office
Software . Categories . Business & Office . Finance & Accounting . Accounting
Software . Substores . Custom Stores . Sage & ACT! . All Sage Products
Software . Refinements . Operating System (operating_system_browse-bin) . Microsoft Windows

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Accessories

Instant Payroll - ( v. 11 ) - complete package - 1 user - CD - Win
Instant Business Suite v11 Including ACT
Training - Instant Accounts Made Easy
Training - Fundamentals of Bookkeeping Stage 1
Training - Fundamentals of Bookkeeping Stage 2

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