Sage Accounting vs. Square Payroll

Pastel also helps users to save time when it comes to bank and supplier reconciliations. Capturing into pastel is also easy. The merit of pastel is that it is very efficient and simplifies most of the financial accounting and human resource management tasks. I have discovered that some long batches (more than 2000), if posted during peak hours, tend to fail during posting and resume later, but at this point, doubling, trebling, or even quadrupling transactions.

Incentivized

I would say that Square Payroll is perfect for companies that don't exceed 100 employees. The multistate payroll system allows for us to be able to handle business with ease when we go do work in Mississippi or Arkansas. The multiple payout options are great for our particular business. We might deal with a multimillion dollar contract one day and a $120 order the next.

Incentivized

• Bank integration - being able to extract banking transaction into Sage Accounting.
• Allocation rules - transactions are auto-allocated once allocation rules have been set up. This is a great time-saver.
• Flexibility - the ability to view transactions, click on them to the allocation point and rectifying if required saves having to create journals, and therefore time. General ledgers therefore stay cleaner and more user-friendly.

Incentivized

• 1099 contractor payments are easy, and they provide you with the IRS filing as part of the service.
• Direct deposit/debit from your already connected account to the employee.
• Reporting and management features are simple yet inclusive.
• Low cost compared to alternative solutions.

Incentivized

• I find it difficult to record journals in cloud accounting. Maybe I just don’t have the knowledge.
• It’s important to export all unrecorded sync bank transactions to Excel to send to clients to explain the payment receipts before being posted. This function is not available on the cloud and makes life harder, having to call out the transactions to clients over the phone.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] they can cancel your service at any time, without warning or explanation. When they do this your funds are held by them for up to 90 days, at which time they are presumably accruing interest on your money. This could take a small business under very quickly and there is nothing you can do about it.
• [I believe] getting verified is complex and not customer friendly. Until you are verified you can't talk to payroll customer service, which is paradoxical. Even getting a hold of account services for this purpose is tricky and exceedingly time-consuming, plus they can not answer most questions directly.
• [I feel] they don't communicate well, closed my account with no notice whatsoever. The only notification I had about the need to verify my account was one easily lost email. Not having responded to this email fast enough created months of stress and difficulty in the setup process, only to find in the end I would need to start from scratch to attempt to sign up again.
• [In my experience] if they close your account you can never reopen it. You have to start a new account from scratch.
• [In my experience] they can hold your money and not deposit funds if your account is "under review". This can happen without explanation. No customer service is directly available for this. I was told I had to wait for them to call me.
• [I believe] they are either lying, or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing to such an extent that they give a great deal of misinformation.

I could not live without Sage Accounting, it has become an integral part of my everyday. The more I have used Sage Accounting the more I have fallen in love with it. I am excited to be part of this ever-evolving accounting system that has grown from strength to strength, making life easier is something Sage does so well.

Sage Accounting is built for the business owner/user and not the accountant, it therefore guides the user and thus detailed accounting knowledge and experience is not a necessarily a prerequisite . It offers a monthly price and therefore no significant up front spend and it tailorable to your business with useful dashboards that again you can tailor to instantly see what's important to you.

It could use a mobile-friendly interface. Other than that it's a simple layout and non-cluttered which allows you to get done what you need to get done. No unnecessary dodads or distractions.

Incentivized

Sage has been always available when I want it. If there is any maintenance work to be done by the Sage team, you are told well in advance. Maintenance is generally carried out late at night or before the day begins for most of us. It continues to be the most reliable software I use.

Performance is top notch, if it is not, it is probably your wi-fi connection. It has happened that pages load slowly because of an error on Sage side but almost never. Overall reports load fine, the site is fast, navigation is fine. I have a client that has so many invoices, it is slow or gets stuck when you try to load a report for a whole year but it is just too many invoices, it makes sense. Just take 2 report for 6 months and combine them, its not an issue for me. I am happy with Sage Accounting's performance.

Incentivized

The support is world class - never ever during 30 plus years in business I have received such helpful, knowledgeable and genuine support as I have from Sage. At Sage people matter and i can chat to someone safe in the knowledge that they will actually listen and assist. This also backed up by huge online portfolio of help and resources

I think they have quick and helpful customer service reps, however, I give them a 9 because I have had to wait on hold for long periods of time before.

Staff are always friendly, and patient, always work at a speed that suits you. You are never rushed, and In only a short time they seem to be able to help you make great strides. It has been a pleasure not a chore, learning how SAGE Accounting works and benefits me and the company.

I find the online training was very informative and they answered all my questions. I am also certified in Sage One and provided online training in the program which I have set up several people on and they love how it keeps them organized.

The clients' business owner worked with Sage on implementation before I began working for them. After consultation with them it is clear the process was quickly performed and without complication. The key takeaway was that Sage is seen as a partner to the business. That said, it was always necessary to engage with an accountant such as myself to extract the best out of the software.

The first integration we had created for our product was with QuickBooks Online. There was a fair amount of work put in to create this solution, and a huge amount of testing to make sure it works properly. Once Sage Accounting had an API available for integration, we included this as well, as a fair number of our customers use Sage products. While there were challenges coming from the difference between product APIs, Sage Accounting was overall easier to implement, and more straightforward with actions and expected outcomes.

Incentivized

We have tested the QuickBooks Online platform. Before using Square, we tried QuickBooks, but the experience we had was not to our liking. QuickBooks Online is a much more complicated platform to use, the interface is much larger and has complexity in the configuration of the collection of hours of work of the employees. In addition, QuickBooks technical support does not respond in time to users' doubts, on several occasions we had several doubts about the operation of the platform and the response was too late and inconsistent. We decided to use Square Payroll because it offered us a much more accessible UI, a simpler but more precise interface for what we needed in our company, to be able to make payroll payments and make detailed reports on the workers.

Incentivized

You can use Sage in your company for various aspects/positions such as bookkeepers, invoicing clerks, accountant, purchasing etc. Everyone can have their own user login and permissions can be set that specific people can do specific jobs without being able to access other peoples progress or accounts of the company.

Incentivized

• Being cloud-based, meaning I can work from anywhere, has had a massive ROI, as I am no longer tied to the office.
• CoPilot has meant we can spend more hours creating work for our business than chasing for payments.
• Statement Runs mean we do not have to spend half a day carrying out the tasks individually.

Incentivized

• Square Payroll has dramatically reduced the time it takes to process payroll.
• We could have a faster payroll with the Square POS integration for commission, but that is not something we've implemented yet.

Incentivized