Sage 50 Accounting Review, Pricing & Features for 2024

The A/P module of Sage 50 is full of great features, but it can be overwhelming. It lets you create vendors, expenses, purchase orders (POs), billings, and service items. You can also set costs of service items if you have standard costs for services. Sage 50 deserves recognition, if only for its A/P features. However, its ease of use isn’t what we would hope for in a small business accounting application.

Sage 50 A/P module

The interface is crowded, and navigation flows use too many popup windows. We see Sage 50 as a software product for accounting professionals and not for small business managers or owners as it can be difficult for those with little to no knowledge of accounting software and accounting principles.

Sage 50 Accounting A/P Features Video

The A/R module of Sage 50 features certain elements found in competitors’ software, but they’re not as dazzling or modern. Its invoice management lets you generate PDF invoices from records, issue receipts and credit memos, and view customer accounts. The only missing feature is the ability to issue checks for customers with credit balances.

Sage 50cloud A/R module

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Creating a New Invoice on Sage 50cloud

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However, using all of these features isn’t as convenient as what we’ve experienced while reviewing Sage 50’s competitors. The interface and overall layout design are old and quite similar to the Windows 97 menu bars, drop-down menus, and pop-up windows. We find it a bit flustering that almost every click gives birth to more windows. But feature-wise, Sage 50 won’t disappoint.

Sage 50 Accounting A/R Features Video

Sage 50 Accounting’s banking features are convenient because you can connect them to your bank accounts, which is useful for reconciliation purposes. However, if you prefer to not give Sage access to your bank account, you can import your banking activity by uploading a bank statement. We also like that bank connection isn’t a prerequisite for performing bank reconciliations.

When reconciling book and bank balances, we’re satisfied with how it shows the balances for outstanding checks, deposits in transit, adjusted balance, and any unreconciled differences. However, we can’t seem to combine checks and cash into a single deposit, which makes it difficult to match deposits in your check register to deposits on your bank statement. Overall, Sage 50’s reconciliation is what we want to see.

Sage 50 Accounting Cash Management & Banking Features Video

Sage 50 Accounting is a great program for project accounting. Although its interface isn’t as pleasant as with other accounting software, the project accounting features cover everything from creating projects to assigning project costs and setting project estimates. We’d like to emphasize that Sage 50 can compare actual to estimated project costs, something QuickBooks Online cannot do. We’re happy to see this feature because it’s vital for project management and monitoring.

Sage 50 Accounting Project Accounting Features Video

Tax tracking on Sage 50 is basic and straightforward. It has the same limitations as QuickBooks, such as the inability to file and pay sales tax liability directly through the software. However, they share good features, such as tracking sales taxes through the sales tax liability account and setting up tax rates. There’s no walkthrough video for this section since this part is already integrated within A/R, A/P, and general features.

Sage 50 falls a bit behind QuickBooks Online in terms of inventory. However, it offers FIFO and LIFO inventory costing that QuickBooks doesn’t have. It also doesn’t miss out on the most important features, like automatic accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS) and the computation of the cost of ending inventories.

We think that Sage 50 is still a worthy choice even if recording the partial receipt of inventory on POs is problematic and viewing the total cost of inventory on hand has limited functionality. Our evaluation of inventory is also part of A/R and A/P, so there’s no video for this.

You can generate many different kinds of reports on Sage 50. However, our case study covers only the necessary reports for small business accounting. Here are the reports we look for in small business accounting software that Sage 50 can generate:

• Comparative balance sheet
• Comparative profit and loss (P&L) statement
• Statement of cash flows
• A/R aging
• A/P aging
• Income/loss by month
• Income/loss by customer
• Income/loss by class
• Income/loss by location
• Income/loss by project
• Unbilled charges
• Unbilled time
• Transaction list by customer
• Expenses by vendor
• General ledger
• Trial balance

Using Sage 50 won’t be a simple experience for do-it-yourself (DIY) business owners or mom-and-pop shops. We can’t recommend it to you if you’re planning to do DIY bookkeeping as it’s hard to use for business owners without accounting software experience. If you have an in-house accountant willing to learn Sage 50 or has knowledge in using advanced accounting software and enterprise resource planning (ERP), you can use Sage 50 in this case.

Sage 50’s score in this criterion is below average given its steep learning curve and difficult setup process. White it has a setup guide, we prefer a setup wizard that’ll provide a series of steps to guide new users to the software. The setup guide appears every time you open Sage 50—unless you disable this pop-up. However, if the setup is performed by someone knowledgeable of Sage 50, it could be a breeze.

Sage 50’s customer service is good since it’s available 24/7 for phone and online chat support. It also has robust self-help information and community support where you can interact with other Sage users. Sage 50’s 24/7 support is included in all plans at no additional cost.

In this area, we want to see a mobile app that can help users maintain their books even if not using the desktop version. We wish Sage 50 had more basic accounting features in its app, but it’s very limited. Sage 50 Capture can only capture receipts and cannot send invoices, categorize expenses, and enter bill payments. We recommend choosing Zoho Books or even FreshBooks for a great mobile app.

Sage Business Cloud Accounting is purely cloud-based accounting software while Sage 50 is a desktop application with cloud features. In terms of functionality, Sage 50 has more robust accounting features than Sage Business Cloud Accounting.

No, it doesn’t, because the Sage 50 software isn’t hosted on the web. The cloud functionality only allows multiple desktop users to share data remotely by transmitting via the cloud, which is included in all Sage 50 subscriptions.

PeachTree Accounting became Sage 50cloud in 2012 and then renamed to Sage 50 in 2023.