Sage hosted their annual summit in London last week, and we were there to receive a valuable insight into the ongoing evolution of their accounting solutions…

Spread across two intuitive days. Sage delivered a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in their portfolio of UK products, and their vision for the future. EBS were once again part of a large assembly of partners. customers and accountants to share in the experience, and we were able to learn the following:

  • Sage Live is a new cloud solution released by Sage this year (we are one of the first few partners to start distributing it), and a lot of time was dedicated to showcasing some of the features involved and a background to its development work. It is built on Salesforce with access to over 3,000 apps, with Salesforce recently winning the Most Innovative Partner award in 2016. Its flexibility allows each business to customise their workflows and processes, which is important since every company has its own DNA, while its open architecture leaves the possibility of integration with many other systems. It has infinite reporting dimensions, and the CRM functionality from its integration with Salesforce qualifies Sage Live as a full ERP solution.
  • Sage 50 is now re-branded as Sage 50c, which will link your on-premise solution to the cloud. One interesting enhancement is that contacts from Sage will be linked to Outlook via Office 365.

Meanwhile our partner Draycir, who develop Spindle and Credit Hound for Sage for more effective document management and credit control respectively, took to the floor to communicate some of the latest improvements in their products. Among them include a new portal for customers to see their own information such as outstanding invoices, Spindle Track & Trace (which will allow you to see when a document has been delivered and opened, and a new licensing structure that will remove the need for licence keys. These changes will all take place over the course of the next 6 months.

Sage Summit_1

Sage Summit_2

Elsewhere, key-note speakers such as Alan Laing (Sage UK MD) and Deborah Meaden (recognisable from Dragons’ Den!) were invited to the stage to address the packed conference hall. Key topics included the importance of diversity in the workplace, strategies for start-up businesses looking to scale up, and a presentation of Pegg (an accounting Chabot that will further eliminate manual work),

Also, Laing re-iterated that the future of technology is in the cloud (this was an important subject at last years’ summit in Chicago). Sage will become more and more cloud-focused, with Laing forecasting that 70% of all software will eventually be in the cloud.

As continuing evidence of Sage’s dominance in the UK market, Laing proudly announced that the firm process £3 trillion every year, and deals with the salary payments of 53% of UK employees.

People have been tweeting about it …..

Well done to the  and  for delivering a successful  roll-on 2018

It’s about acting like a start-up, with a fresh mentality & seeing your business through your customers’ eyes” 

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