Sage One

Sage One is a cloud-based business services solution aimed at micro businesses and small business. Sage One provides these businesses a platform that offers invoicing, project tracking, expense management, and more. For $29 per month, entrepreneurs, mom-and-pop shops, and? small business owners, are given an integrated service to perform primary business functions. Sage One allows small business owners to focus on running their business and not have to learn complicated accounting and business software. Sage One offers a? fluid, user-friendly interface and intuitive workflow, although its one-size-fits all functionality limits customizations.

You can try Sage One for free for 30 days. Although the pricing is $29 per month, the service is now available at a promotional price of $1 per month, for three months. With Sage One, customers receive 5GB of storage, support, unlimited number of team members, and the ability to add a second administrator account. Additional administrator accounts are an?extra $10 per month.

Signing Up
Sage One has a clean, easy-to-use interface. During a demo of the product, our Editor-In-Chief remarked that the interface had a similar look to Mint.com. Both services have a similar UI, which focuses on ease-of-use, but, of course, Mint.com is for personal finance and Sage One is for small business.

The sign up process is simple, but a bit lengthy with several security check questions to set up and password complexity requirements, inconvenient perhaps, but necessary when you are placing your business data in the cloud.

Once you log in, you have a few options: to view a video overview or start customizing your settings. The initial configuration steps for most include, adding your company information such as business name, address and so on. This information appears on your invoices.

The workflow in a nutshell, works like this: add clients and contacts, add projects, assign tasks to collaborators and employees, collaborate on tasks and projects, bill clients, and keep track of income and expenses. Sage One is a scaled-down, integrated accounting, collaboration and project management cloud service. One business process it lacks, though, is payroll.

Starting Projects and Configuring
Starting a project involves adding a project name, client name, estimated time to complete the project, estimated expenses and billable fees. Banking and credit card information can be added as well. Doing so allows you to keep track of financial transactions. However, you can't directly connect a checking or other bank or credit account with your Sage One account as you can with Intuit QuickBooks Premier Edition 2011. Intuit's service, however,? has more emphasis on the accounting side of business.

Anyone using Sage One to track financial services has to ensure that banking information within Sage One and information from their live accounts is in sync, which may be a bit of a hassle for those who do lots of financial transactions. You also can't import business information from other systems except for contacts; done?by importing a text-delimited file.

You can, however, set up ledgers. Several pre-created ledgers exist that you can apply to your business such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Sales Tax, Office Supply Expenses, and others. Each time income or expenses are recorded a category?based on the ledger account?is assigned to the transaction.

There's also some good help within the interface. For example, you may not be well-acquainted with terminology such as "Asset," "Liability," or "Equity." The help text breaks down business terms in simple English and also advises you to call Sage support for more clarification and assistance.

Sage One has some canned reports, three actually, including one for viewing aged invoices, balance sheets, and profit and loss.? Reports can be saved as PDFs or exported as CSV files.

There's a message on the reports page from Sage One encouraging users to submit suggestions for other reports. That type of communication and willingness to work with a small business owner is Sage One's biggest strength. In fact, the site's contact's page has a full bio and contact information for every member of the Sage One team for you to reach them with questions and comments.

One Size May Not Fit All & Other Annoyances
Sage One does not offer much in the way of customization. You can do simple tailoring like uploading your company logo to add to invoices, and you can make some tweaks on individual invoices, but you can't edit invoice templates, which is not so great because different businesses may need different elements on their invoices.

One other minor issue I encountered when working within Sage One, I didn't find any way to assign more than one contact to a task. If you have two employees you want to assign the same task, it seems as though the only option is to create two separate tasks for each.

A Very Good Starter Service
Sage One is a great solution for very small businesses with no more than nine employees, with the caveat that, as it stands the service doesn't offer much by way of customization and scalability. Every business owner's intent is to grow, right? As your business grows and data needs grow, without the ability to integrate with other platforms or banking institutions, a thriving small business may eventually outgrow Sage One. Scalability is very limited without the ability to integrate with or export data to other financial systems.

Still, there's no denying the appeal of a reasonably priced, simple to use service that combines most of the major functionality a small business could need into one central, portal. Even in this early incarnation, Sage One is a solid four-star service. I'm very interested to see how Sage beefs up the service (by adding banking integration and a payroll module, for example) in the next few months.?

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