Sage Accounting and Sage Payroll are a suite of cloud-based[1] accountancy and payroll products developed by Sage Group aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises as well as the self employed. They exist under the suite banner of Sage Business Cloud, and the products were initially known as Sage One and are available in many of the territories that Sage operate.
Originally launched in the UK and Ireland in 2011 Sage Business Cloud is a set of small business management tool that offers accounting, payroll, payments and time-tracking tools. It includes mobile apps that accept business payments, manage and pay bills, and payroll functions. The product launched in the United States in 2012, Canada, France, Germany and Spain in 2013 and has since launched in other territories that Sage operates in.
Sage Business Cloud is developed using Ruby on Rails and C#/.NET Core by global teams within Sage including at those at their headquarters in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
The Sage Business Cloud brand is applied to Sage's cloud-based offerings including Sage People and Sage HR. Sage X3, is also a part of the wider Sage Business Cloud brand but aimed at larger enterprises.
History
1981 to 2000
The Company was founded by David Goldman, Paul Muller, and Graham Wylie in 1981 in Newcastle, to develop estimating and accounting software for small businesses.
A student at Newcastle University, Graham Wylie, took a summer job with an accountancy firm funded by a government small business grant to write software to help their record keeping. This became the basis for Sage Line 50. Next, hired by David Goldman to write some estimating software for his printing company, Campbell Graphics, Graham used the same accounting software to produce the first version of Sage Accounts. David was so impressed that he hired Graham and academic Paul Muller to form Sage, selling their software first to printing companies, and then to a wider market through a network of resellers.
In 1984, the Company launched Sage software, a product for the Amstrad PCW word processor, which used the CP/M operating system. Sage software sales escalated in that year from 30copies a month to over 300. The Company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1989.
In 1994, Paul Walker was appointed Chief Executive. In 1998, Sage's Professional Accountants Division was established. In 1999, Sage entered FTSE 100 and launched a dedicated Irish division, based in Dublin as well as its e-business strategy. In that same year the UK acquisition of Tetra saw Sage enter the mid range business software market.
UK/Ireland version
In the UK and Ireland there are currently four products under the Sage 50 banner; Accounts, Payroll, HR and P11D. Sage 50cloud Accounts was the market-leading accounting solution for many years.
The product currently known as Sage 50cloud Accounts has its origins in some of the earliest solutions that Sage produced. A direct relative of the current product is the Sage Sterling range which became available in September 1989 as a replacement for Sage's successful Businesswise Accounts range.13 Sage Sterling was available for DOS and in the early 1990s for Microsoft Windows. The product was re-branded as Sage Sterling +2 and in 1993 a version of the product became available for Apple Macintosh. By 1993 Sage Sterling was market leader having accounted for 62.5% of the integrated accounting software market. In the late 1990s, Sage Instant, a cut-down version of the product line was introduced.
US version
The US version of the product was previously called Peachtree Accounting. A conversion to the Peachtree/Sage 50 data format was made available when Simply Accounting was taken offthe market. In 2013 it was brought under theSage 50 banner.
Peachtree Accounting was originally sold by a software publisher founded in Atlanta in 1978 by Ben Dyer, Ron Roberts, Steve Mann, and John Hayes. The company was carved out of The Computersystem Center, an early Altair dealer founded by Roberts, Mann, Jim Dunion, and Rich Stafford, which Dyer had joined as the manager and where its first software was published in 1977. Peachtree was the first successful business software made for microcomputers, supplanting the General Ledger programmed with CBASIC and distributed by Structured Systems Group. It is the oldest microcomputer computer program for business in current use. company expanded its offerings with its acquisition of Layered, an accounting program designed for use on the Macintosh. The company's products were included in the initial launch of the IBM Personal Computer, and it was acquired by Management Science America (MSA) in June 1981.
By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Peachtree was the world's seventh-largest microcomputer software company, with $21.7 million in 1983 sales. After several subsequent changes of ownership ending with ADP, Peachtree was eventually acquired by the Sage Group in 1998 for US$145 million.
