Published on the 02/06/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Australia has become the 14th country in the world to be offered access to Sage One, a cloud based small business accounting system which wants to take on Xero and MYOB …
UK based accounting software specialist the Sage Group has finally turned on its cloud based accounting system in Australia – though it has not announced any plans to do so in New Zealand just yet.
While the managing director of Sage Australia, Alan Osrin (pictured), has acknowledged that the company is very late to the cloud market, he believes low cost and existing software relationships around its Handisoft and MicroPay systems will spur adoption. Sage One is launched with a two month free trial period, and the two user system is being offered at a promotional price of $A15 a month to the end of the year when prices will rise to $25 a month.
The challenge will come in the marketing of the product as key rivals Xero and MYOB have well-oiled sales machines and established relationships with many accountants who recommend their products. Osrin however argues that only a small percentage of accounting software users have yet transitioned to the cloud, and that Sage – though late to the market – will be able to compete.
He described Sage’s launch as setting up a three way race in the Australian market – but the market is considerably more crowded as neither Reckon nor Intuit can be dismissed as rivals for cloud based accounting solutions in Australia, and all four have more cloud customers than Sage at this point.
To spruik the product Sage Australia has set up a new operating company which will be led by general manager Lukas Taylor, previously the chief strategy officer at JCurve, the NetSuite small business focused subsidiary.
The company has hired Dimension Data to host the system in Australia out of data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.
Two versions of Sage One have been released – one for small businesses, offering invoicing, bank feed integration, financial dashboards and payroll for up to five employees. An accountants’ edition which supports client collaboration and automated compliance has also been released.
