Sage One: A Year In The life!

By Simon Bell, Commercial Product Manager

The 21st of June 2011 was a significant day for Sage Ireland with the launch of the Sage One product in the Irish market. With the aim of providing a great and easy to use accounts product for the entrepreneur and start-up business sector of the market Sage One was developed with the input of these types of business and their actual needs in mind.

At Sage we recognised that a business owner or manager (or both) is not necessarily an expert when it comes to finance and realistically should not have to be either. The focus of this person is to use their drive and talents in the right places and not get bogged down in managing the finances. With this in mind, and starting with Sage One Cashbook for cash based businesses and Sage One Accounts for businesses that have slightly more complex requirements, Sage have built an accounts product suite that is simple to use for the non-finance user.

Building on the early success of the Sage One Accounts and Cashbook products we subsequently used the same principles to launch Sage One Payroll in December 2011. Sage One Payroll adds the ability to process payroll for up to 15 employees easily and without a need for expert payroll knowledge. We know payroll is not always straightforward but we do have the expertise, from our years of experience in this area, to be able to provide a simple solution in plain English that allows a user with any level of expertise to easily process payroll.

Spanning all three products is the Sage One Accountants Edition. Built specifically for Accountants it allows users of the Sage One products to invite their accountants to view their accounts and payroll products online and gives the level of reassurance required that someone can oversee all their activities to ensure they are compliant and also gives that level of reassurance that all of the actions taken are being done correctly.

In addition to all of the above we have been busy doing fresh releases of these products and the infrastructure behind these at least once per month. For the Sage R&D teams this has meant a huge amount of work on an on-going basis and for the customer it has meant continuous product improvement giving better experience, enhanced functionality and a really compelling product that meets and exceeds the customer expectations while maintaining the core value of simplicity for the end user.

For us here in Sage it has been an exciting journey to date, but there is much, much more coming down the line in the coming months. Our key ethos in Sage One is, and will remain, Simple Online Accounting and Payroll Software for Small Business with support by the experts in this field. It has been a busy first year and the next year will be equally busy (if not more so!) and we are really looking forward to the journey.