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![Sage Group [LSE: SGE]: Powerhouse of Accounting Solutions](/company_logos/xb3a4sagelogo.jpg "Sage Group [LSE: SGE]: Powerhouse of Accounting Solutions")
Stephen Kelly, CEO It all started when Graham Wylie, a student at Newcastle University took a summer job as a programmer with an accountancy firm in the UK. Funded by a government small business grant to write software that would help with the firm’s record keeping, the internship later became the stepping stone for Sage Line 50. Subsequently, he was hired by David Goldman—founder of Sage—to build an estimating software for his then-printing company, Campbell Graphics. Wylie used the same accounting software to produce the first version of Sage Accounts. Impressed, Goldman hired Wylie and Paul Muller, an academic, to form Sage, selling their software first to printing companies, and then to a wider market through a network of resellers. As desktop PCs became more widespread, so the Sage range grew and the business went from strength to strength.Today, Sage is leading the revolution into the new-age accounting era through their plethora of unique products like Sage One that empowers small businesses through its collaborative, ‘anywhere-anytime,’ features and Sage 50, which is best-in-class desktop accounting platform with cloud mobility. For the last three decades, Sage group is running strong and has transformed into a multinational enterprise software company assisting enterprises around the globe. “We have a very clear vision: to become the clear leader in cloud accounting,” says Stephen Kelly, CEO of Sage.
"Recently Sage joined forces with Salesforce.com to build Sage Live—a built-from-scratch accounting system providing more than basic debits and credits"
As the world’s third-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and the largest provider of accounting software to small businesses, Sage has more than 6 million customers worldwide. Sage One is the “go to” cloud accounting and payroll product for start-up and small businesses. For example: Lorna Syson’s interior accessories designing and manufacturing business uses Sage One Accounts to manage the business finances and also uses Sage Pay to take payments from customers. It makes bookkeeping and payroll simple and easy, allowing the customers to concentrate on building successful businesses.
Creating a Difference
Sage’s accounting software is creating a difference among the small-and-medium businesses (SMB) by automating what are typically manual processes, resulting in getting more work done in less time. This results in reducing the errors, as the software offers automatic calculations and common sets of data.
Sage One is an online accounting software with dashboards, graphs, and drill-down features that organizations and their accountants can access, 24/7 via the internet. With all of Sage One’s features and reporting, users can easily manage their banking and cash flow and always know about their financial productivity. Sage One offers the flexibility for users to simply login from wherever they are and start working and access data hosted on the cloud with just an internet connection. For a bird’s eye view of an organization’s business, the dashboard in Sage One is the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of how the business is progressing. Dashboard Widgets can be added or removed to display only the details most relevant to any business.
We see a very strong, independent future for Sage. What you’re seeing now is the evolution of the company to the next phase and the transformation of what’s going on
Illustrating the popularity of Sage One among the SMBs is the case of renowned photographer Jason Savage. Understanding the need to travel light in his business as a nature photographer and leader of workshops and classes throughout North America, Savage adopted Google Apps and Sage One. Today he is able to work without boundaries or limitations on the move—perfectly allowing him to manage cash flow and invoice the clients wherever he is, whether through laptop or smartphone. Sage One offers the experience to share, store, and collaborate on documents essential to any small business quickly and easily.
Sage started offering Sage 50, which has been a popular in-office solution offering capabilities, including isolating the entire accounting data on one computer or, in case of a multi-user license, the user could share the database from a desktop machine or a local server, so that multiple users could work concurrently. With the advent of cloud, Sage 50c was created to enhance the capabilities of the already existing software and build a platform on which additional features could be offered now and in the future.
Today, Sage 50c still needs to be installed on at least one computer system. Once in place, the Sage 50c administrator in the organization can choose to activate “Sage Drive” from within the software: Once activated, all of the Sage 50c accounting data, including multiple companies, will be synched between the main desktop or server and the secure cloud servers over at Sage. This feature is free, no matter how much space users use or how many companies they create, and the data is backed up—which is handy. Once sharing is in place, the Sage 50c administrator can give access to the data in the cloud to up to five named users.
Recently Sage joined forces with Salesforce.com to build Sage Live—a built-from-scratch accounting system providing more-than-basic debits and credits. It supports multiple companies and multiple currencies and reports in multiple dimensions, with no limit on the number. For example, a customer could set up the general ledger to report profit and loss by customer group, product family, project, or any number of other dimensions. The system has a full mobile user interface. Salesforce has been working hard to deliver its platform as one that is mobile first. By building with the latest capabilities of the platform, Sage Live crosses seamlessly between desktop and various mobile devices. Users can not only view data, they can also do any transaction on a mobile device.
Building the Future
Sage’s vision is to be recognized as the most valuable supporter of SMBs, by creating solutions that can take these companies to greater heights. The company has plans to provide these organizations, with a range of more easy-to-use business management software and services—from accounting and payroll to ERP and customer relationship management. The company also advises and guides the customers alongside supporting them through Sage’s global network of local experts to help them solve their business problems, giving them the confidence to achieve their business ambitions.
The company has been a pro in understanding their customers’ needs and the challenges they face and has innovation and entrepreneurial spirit embedded in their heart. Sage has experienced a steady and exceptional revenue growth for the past years, which Kelly attributes to continued tech innovations. These include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and chatbots, more of which will come throughout 2017. “All of those factors combined have led to our strong results. For the first time in a decade we’ve recorded double digit recurring revenue growth and we’ve gone past a million subscription contracts,” adds Kelly.
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Company
Sage Group
Management
Stephen Kelly, CEO
Description
Automates, organizes, and integrates typical financial transactions, helping a business run more smoothly every day
