I have a couple of colleagues who are huge PeachTree fans which, come to find out is apparently now Sage 50. Does anyone have insights into the meaningful differences of
Sage 50 vs Quickbooks aka PeachTree
Answers
If you are a contractor then you have job costing needs. Your main concern will be in the ease of building estimates, transition to billing, time tracking and costing for sub contractors. If Quickbooks and its apps and third party tools is doing a great job for you, then its fine to stay with quickbooks. You may consider Method CRM Field Services module that is an option for job costing, multiple field employee logins, time tracking. It does not integrate to payroll but you can upload a file to your payroll system. Method will send job information to QB billing.
Personally I never liked Peachtree but if Sage acquired it perhaps it has a certain value. I believe that Sage sells Timberline under a new name. Timberline is contractor specific.
The number of employees you have tells me a couple things:
You need to review the potential value of Method because method can be customized to bypass the license seats for Quickbooks users by creating transaction processing feeds from many users to one QB user seat, plus you get the benefit of the CRM.
Bill.com may be of high value for you as well. go to bill.com and register for a product demo webinar.
Today you want to be talking to professionals who are familiar with a variety of options so that you get a full featured experience for your industry vertical without the large cost of consulting and implementation. Many of these new cloud vendors will help you to implement for a low fee.
One of the issues you will run into however is right now, there is no out of the box cloud set of tools that will support contractor job costing, but Method has a viable solution, so take a look at that and get more mileage out of your Quickbooks.
Hi Valerie,
Thanks for the detailed info. I will definitely check out Method. Any thoughts on Sage?
Anonymous,
The real issue might be that one has moved beyond QB to more than just Sage.
In fact, I found this interesting
"When Is The Right Time To Graduate From QuickBooks?"
https://www.proformative.com/whitepapers/when-right-time-graduate-quickbooks
Enjoy!
Best... Sarah
I have been a member of the Sage Accountants Network for a few years now. Sage streamlined Peachtree to align vertically with their larger product offerings in an effort to accommodate growth of organizations. As well, they changed their branding to reflect the vertical alignment within their respective families (Peachtree to Sage 50, MAS90 to Sage 100, etc).
Personally, I'm not a fan of the so-called
I use Sage 50 Quantum 2014, which is the highest level of the Sage 50 family before moving upward to Sage 100. At one time, Intuit posted product comparisons between Quickbooks and Peachtree. You'll be hard-pressed today to find a hard-core side-by-side comparison posted by Intuit pitting their products directly against Sage 50. In fact, if you contact an Intuit Salesperson and ask them to provide you with
I have a client who owns a construction company (metal pre-fabricated grain storage buildings) that is in its 18th year of growth. Where Sage benefits him is in the following areas:
1) Accurate Job Costing--Sage 50 Quantum has built-in time sheet tracking, job tracking down to the phase and level of completion--all integrated within the same system.
2) Change Order tracking--not much more to elaborate on here.
3) Departmentalized and Consolidated Financial Statement Reporting--you can departmentalize a single company and view individual financial statements (as if you have multiple operating units) / or track separate physical companies and view consolidated financial statements to get an accurate view of your overall portfolio.
4) Pervasive Database--Quickbooks does not historically 'play well in the sandbox with others'. Intuit chose to write a database heavily-laden with source code that causes Quickbooks to experience frequent data integrity issues (many are serious). I've spent many hours rebuilding Quickbooks databases. Sage 50 has a very friendly database and does integrate well with other programs using open databases (i.e. estimatics programs, etc.)
5) Accuracy--Quickbooks has always had an issue with this as a company grows. Sage 50 is the only off-the-shelf
6) Sage 50 follows the order of YOUR
I would personally avoid any '.com' solutions for any of your core operations, period. They will not be around for years to come. If you take just a little time and make a little effort in building the right solution, you'll be able to maintain an accurate and useable system.
The fact that you are seeking advice on the meaningful differences is a HUGE step in the right direction. I hope the details of my advice help you.
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I think Valerie's suggestion is a good one. QuickBooks definitely has a ton of options and integrations designed specifically for contractors. So it might be best to explore those before migrating to an entirely new platform. I'm not sure if it was available when this question was originally posted, but Intuit now has a field service module (Field Service Management) that might be a good solution for you.
That being said, the new line of Sage 50 products appear to be fairly decent. As with QuickBooks, they are designed to easily allow you to grow and migrate to a more powerful version as your business demands increase (as Timothy noted). They have also made the software a bit more developer friendly, so I think we will continue to see useful extensions and integrations being created. And the new user interface definitely makes reading reports and reviewing data simple and easy.
I'm attending Sage Summit this week in Las Vegas. Awesome event, 5,000 attendees.
Sage is making great strides and moving quickly. Check 'em out. We are Sage 50 Quantum user, but based on this show, will consider a move up to Sage100EPR.
Personally, I like QB and Peachtree both. Have been using Invoicera for some time though. It is very satisfactory, both in terms of features and user-interface.
Sage 50 and QuickBooks differ a lot when it comes to cost and capability to meet particular industry needs.
QuickBooks is an ideal choice for small businesses as it is easy to use and more affordable compared to Sage 50. On the other hand, Sage 50 is a better option if you are in construction, manufacturing, or distribution business. Sage 50 has features specific to construction business like subcontractor management, retainage, labor burden calculations, job progress reporting. This software provides complete vision on every facet of the business.
As you mentioned that you have six projects and 25-30 people; hosting Sage 50 would be a more practical solution. It will help you to keep track of your business anytime, anywhere, and collaborate with people working off-site.
Both are very popular and most used accounting software for business and offer entry-level solutions for small businesses that are affordable and easy-to-use. Each person has unique skills and interests, just like that each business is equally as different and the software as well.
QuickBooks allows you to easily keep up with payroll and other financial aspects of your business, like sales, expenses, and purchases. This is one of the best solutions for easily managing and running small and mid-sized businesses. while Sage offers more tailored industry-specific business management options, like Construction and Real Estate, Manufacturing, Wholesale Distribution, etc.
The QuickBooks software offers efficient accounting solutions and also helps in bookkeeping while Sage helps in collaborative projects at the same time keeping the employees on-task.
No matter the version of Sage or QuickBooks you choose, cloud hosting is an excellent way to enjoy more perks and features, such as.
Decreased IT and Hardware Costs
Remote Access
Custom-Built Dedicated Servers
Integrated Hosted Applications
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