Sage Line 50 Financial Controller 9

Listening to suggestions from users has resulted in a tidy-up for other areas too, such as a brand-new taskbar for creating user-defined shortcuts to the data-entry screen or module you require most often. You can also now trade in foreign currencies, with a complete new implementation offering multicurrency dealing affecting customers, suppliers and bank accounts.

Add to this the new archiving system that takes last year's data and keeps it safe for future comparisons, and it's obvious Sage has worked hard on this version. If you think you might grow quickly, buying into a flexible client/server product like Access Dimensions Lite (see Reviews, issue 98, p170) - from which Sage has borrowed some of its ideas - might well be a wise longer-term investment. However, for the typical small business, Line 50 is still the benchmark for accounting at this price. Plus, if you already run Line 50 and haven't felt compelled to upgrade for a while, now's the time.

Author: Tim Woodward