Newcastle-based Sage is a long-running UK software success story. Over 20 years of tweaking and refining its accounting and payroll packages, the company has sold its products to half a million UK businesses, from the relatively cheap Instant Accounting for one-person operations, to the web-enabled Line 500 for big businesses. Throw in strong customer support and training, and taking accounting in-house with Sage looks much less scary.

The Line 50 series debuted in the early 1990s, pitching at the more established business, with up to 50 employees and a turnover of up to £2m a year. This is Britain's most popular PC-based accounting package, and Financial Controller is top of the range - a suite of three applications, the accounts package, payroll, and Act Contact management.

Accountants getting to grips with the company books won't have much of a learning curve here. Running on the firm's PCs, Line 50 presents an interface familiar to anyone who uses Windows. It's simple to import data from Excel, Word and Outlook, and the package contains the three basic ledgers (sales, purchase and nominal ledger), profit and loss, balance sheets, plus management reports, VAT management and credit control. There are also stock control, invoicing and cheque printing functions. Further features exclusive to Financial Controller are checks on sales order shortfall and fulfilment, processing, goods received notes and foreign currency.

Sage has continually beefed up the online element. Bacs transfers are a boon to cashflow, as customers have fewer excuses not to pay there and then. This meshes neatly with Webtrader 50, a service that lets you trade online, securely transferring orders, for which you'll be charged a monthly registration fee. Electronic banking is embedded within the package, allowing you to bring your account and the software together, reconciling what the bank says with your Line 50 transactions, and you can check your balance online. Be warned, though, you will again be charged an annual service fee by Sage, plus a bank service charge.

The Report Designer creates and amends reports and stationery layouts, and starts you off with more than 200 report templates, including reports in HTML format, so they can be posted online.

Sage offers a flexibility not always found in accounting packages. You can set multiple delivery addresses for a single customer, while invoicing centrally. And there are flexible product options within invoicing - you can enter special stock codes for one-off items or custom-made articles. In this respect it beats Quickbooks hands down, though MYOB offers similar flexibility. Financial Controller lets you prepare quotations and, once accepted, transform them into confirmed orders and invoices. It also lets you generate purchase orders automatically from outstanding sales orders.

The big complaint about Sage is that it's not cheap. Of course that doesn't mean it's not value for money - you're getting a watertight, multi-user system that will not only do away with expensive external accounting services but will run every aspect of your firm's stock control and payroll systems.

Still some things do grate. Like Quickbooks, Line 50 lets you send and receive orders, invoices and other trading documents by email instead of the post, but charges you £99 a year for the privilege. Sage says it uses structured email containing a security code to make it difficult for tampering to go undetected, we're just not sure it is worth £99. It's just one of many examples where you have to pay as you go to make the most of a strong package.Similarly, while the initial 60 days of free support is welcome, it gets pretty pricey after that, with a complex menu of charges. Support for the Act Contact manager software alone will cost you £75 a year.

But just as they used to say no finance director ever got sacked for buying IBM, no accounts manager is ever going to receive his P45 for using Sage to run the books - a good, solid package and the industry standard.

Contact: Sage 0845 300 0900
www.sage.co.uk

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