[background/rant]
While I must've worked on and configured countless Sage installations over the years, I've never actually used it, nor do I know much about accounting or bookkeeping. It seems that Sage is the 'go to' Accounting software (in the UK at least) but, from a technical point of view, I find it quite lacking, especially for larger organisations.
It seems that their target market is very small businesses, typically with Sage installed directly on a desktop PC, with maybe a few other PCs accessing the data via a network share. They don't (properly) support Server 2012 installations, RDS or virtual machines. More recently, they introduced a database management service that needs to be installed on the 'main PC' (which appears to be some sort of afterthought/workaround to prevent database corruption) which doesn't support DFSR and namespaces, meaning that I've been forced to reduce data availability down to a single server for some customers. In fact, not only are namespaces and DFS/R not supported, their tech support had no idea what they were!
Another small but irritating example of what I mean, as anyone who has ever used/opened Sage will know, it prompts the user EVERY time the program is closed to do a backup, which is probably great in a small server-less organisation where the accounts staff themselves are responsible for taking daily backups, but in a larger business, where data replication, versioning and backups are taken care of automatically it's just an unnecessary and irritating feature and yet there's no way to turn the prompts off (according to Sage support).
[/background/rant]
TL;DR
So, I'm looking for Sage Accounts/Payroll alternatives and wondering what else is out there and what other's experiences are, from both a technical point of view and the end-user's experience. Presently I'm looking at Pegasus Opera (which seems to have an SQL integration option). Has anyone had any experience with this? Are there any other good alternatives to Sage?
While I must've worked on and configured countless Sage installations over the years, I've never actually used it, nor do I know much about accounting or bookkeeping. It seems that Sage is the 'go to' Accounting software (in the UK at least) but, from a technical point of view, I find it quite lacking, especially for larger organisations.
It seems that their target market is very small businesses, typically with Sage installed directly on a desktop PC, with maybe a few other PCs accessing the data via a network share. They don't (properly) support Server 2012 installations, RDS or virtual machines. More recently, they introduced a database management service that needs to be installed on the 'main PC' (which appears to be some sort of afterthought/workaround to prevent database corruption) which doesn't support DFSR and namespaces, meaning that I've been forced to reduce data availability down to a single server for some customers. In fact, not only are namespaces and DFS/R not supported, their tech support had no idea what they were!
Another small but irritating example of what I mean, as anyone who has ever used/opened Sage will know, it prompts the user EVERY time the program is closed to do a backup, which is probably great in a small server-less organisation where the accounts staff themselves are responsible for taking daily backups, but in a larger business, where data replication, versioning and backups are taken care of automatically it's just an unnecessary and irritating feature and yet there's no way to turn the prompts off (according to Sage support).
[/background/rant]
TL;DR
So, I'm looking for Sage Accounts/Payroll alternatives and wondering what else is out there and what other's experiences are, from both a technical point of view and the end-user's experience. Presently I'm looking at Pegasus Opera (which seems to have an SQL integration option). Has anyone had any experience with this? Are there any other good alternatives to Sage?
