URGH – bitter taste! Sage hikes One SaaS price 50 per cent Accounting-as-a-service firm Sage is hiking its cloudy payroll software prices by half, The Register has learned. The British Salesforce partner last week wrote to customers of Sage One warning them they will be charged £15 per month from April 1 – up from £10. In the letter seen by The Reg, the firm justified the price on …
"I upgrade our accounts software every 5 years. Desktop only. Not going cloud - no control over pricing and changing supplier is a nightmare.
That is all."
Yes, SaaS cloud services is becoming a licence to print money...entirely at the customer's expense and this does not appear to be an instance where such a large rise is justified.
The problem here is contractual, not cloud per se. If you were on a monthly Sage licence it'd be the same. Although you would have the option to continue illegally, not that anyone reputable would suggest it.
SaaS does very much facilitate short-term contracts. Which is, of course, one of the reasons people like it.
Once you are locked in, then we'll be loaded.
I'll never be signing up for any cloud service / subscription, I like to own my things outright. That way I can ensure that it works the same today as it did tomorrow and I know what I need to fork out for at any given time.
The big bonus is that when you go bust or just decide that you are stopping providing the service, then I'll still have access, unlike those miserable people who are now hooked on your subscription and just lost everything.
I understand that accounting is important but after miss entering our year end month there was no way to change it.
Two years added up to about £700 so it was a fair test.
My accountant has always told me that you need nothing more than excel to do your accounts and he's kinda right (bells and whistles aside)
"My accountant has always told me that you need nothing more than excel to do your accounts and he's kinda right (bells and whistles aside)"
He's kind of right... but only up to a point. I could do my own accounts in a spreadsheet (but it would never be Excel!), but I don't - meanwhile, where I am today, doing so would be insane.
In fact I use Sage 50 for both - but the desktop version, none of this cloudy crap.
its demonstrating compliance to multiple, potentially conflicting bodies of rules and outcomes of those accounts. It can be done by an old bloke with a quill pen and ledgers but that's no good when you have to search out all the instances of a particular transaction over time etc.
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