I have just a quick question, I have a client who came for me to do her books whilst she went on maturnity leave, and now her baby is a bit older she wants to do her own books again, she would like me to send her accounts to her which are on SAGE which means that she then as access to the SAGE software I have bought and she can then continue to us this to do her books, the question I have is can I charge her a one off payment for sending her the SAGE and if so how much, I paid £525 for the software.
I appreicate any help as I need to get back to her with her file as soon as possible.
If you send a back up disk of the data only she would not be able to put on her computer unless she has purchased the same version or newer sage to restore the data to.
If the client does not want to pay you for your sage disk at the cost you paid then obviously her back up disk of data won't be usable.
If client does not want to purchase this or her own copy of sage you could charge her for the time and cost of printing, it takes to print out all the necessary reports trial balance, profit and loss, nominal activity report etc and then it is up to the client to find another method of bookkeeping but she will have all the reports up to date.
Forgot to say that in the future might be better to tell clients when you take them on that if they want to have accounts on sage they need to pay for the software, then if they ever decide to leave you hand back the sage because the client paid for it (if you have many clients make sure you label the sage packages so you know whose is whose)
I have had clients not wanting to purchase software so have used MS Accounting Express for free.
Do you like Microsoft Accounting? I have been playing about with it myself because I am thinking about using it for new clients that I take on. How do find it?
I don't really like Microsoft Accounting. Will use it if client does not want to pay for Sage but don't find it very user friendly, possibly because I have used sage for 15 years and only used MS Accounting last year for the first time so will take time to like it as much as sage.
I'm struggling a bit with it myself at the moment, that's the reason that I asked. I only have Sage Instant Accounts at the moment and I don't want to buy Sage to use for my clients unless they ask for it.
There are ways around that, if you client is happy to pay for sage, if you or a friend or family member are good with computers you can get virtual pc software set up on your computer, this allows you to set up as many different virtual pcs as you need - 1 per client and allows you to set up sage on each one without it conflicting.
Basically a virtual PC is like having a seperate computer within your PC, has its own operating system, think it is called VMWare.
worth bearing in mind that Sage licences are not normally transferable i.e you can't sell it on. You don't own the software, you only bought a no-transferable right to yse it.
Alison
A virtual machine approach would work, but you should have a windows licence for each VM and I suspect that Sage would argue for multiple licenses as well.
If you need to support multiple customers, look at Sage 50 Client Manager
As per the above comments, I would give her the TB (and other reports they may require) from your Sage and then it is up to the client to purchase their own copy of Sage if this is what they wanted to use going forward.
