FreeAgent Accounting software: a year in the life

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

It seems to me that there’s only any point commenting on Accounts software once you’ve been using it for a year. Well, just over a year ago, I made the switch from Sage to FreeAgent in the desperate hope that I might find something less labyrinthine, easier to understand and, perchance, actually useful on a day to day basis.

When I set my main business up in 1999 there was really only one choice for accounting software: Sage and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was still the case given their marketing budget and visibility.

The consequences of choosing Sage were that I needed to employ someone specifically to use that one piece of software and that I got very little use out of it because I would have needed to buy an extra licence to view the information. I confess that I experienced many instances of “Sage Rage” as every useful feature (such as my being able to share my book-keeper’s information) involved an extra licence at huge expense. In my view, Sage abuses its position as the de-facto standard but, having now used an online service, I will never go back to any desktop software, least of all Sage. (more…)