Last financial year the company was a partnership and it's just been registered and is now limited. Some of the details have changed. I thought the easiest way of continuing in Sage Instant would be to set up a new company, but I can't find this option, it always defaults to the existing one with the only other choices being the practise stuff. Also the accounts were not kept up to date on Sage last year as when it was realised it was going to change it was handed over to a qualified accountant. This means that to continue with the existing company in Sage would require entering a lot of invoices/receipts for last year to make the opening balances correct.
If the partnership is finished with, can't you just delete all the data and start as though it's a new installation, if you can't do it any other way? Or even delete the data, uninstall Sage, and do a complete new installation.
If you want to keep the nominal, sales and purchase ledger accounts, you may be able to delete all the transactions, but it's years since I used Instant and it's probably changed.
Chances are you have a one company version. You would need a multi-company version to have two companies.
You will need to complete all the posting for the partnership, and take a back up for the accountant. If the accountant doesn't have a Sage that he/she can restore the back up to, you will need to print off all the reports before taking the next step. So the key is not to rush!
One you are happy that the accountant has access to all they need to close the partnership, you can "rebuild" the data within the current company - this is within file/maintenance. Rebuild allows you to wipe all transactions on the current company. You can wipe everything, but, should you wish to, you can keep supplier and customer names, and you can keep the current coding structure, also. It depends what you need. If you keep any data, because all transactions are wiped, you can go through and delete unused customers/suppliers/NL codes afterwards. You can change the year end within tools also, before you start processing.
I didn't think that you could have multiple companies with Sage Instant? Have they changed that?
I know that there have been debates over on Aweb (normally with people being told to go buy VT instead (not by me, I'm just a spectator over there)) where there are discussion around having to buy one version of instant for each business that you support and needing to partition one's hard drive in order to support multiple copies of the same software.
All seems very strange to me and it must be truly great software to warrant that sort of dedication to attempting to get several versions to work legally on one's PC.
Sure that anyone with that sort of dedication would think that the price for Sage 50 client manager is a bargain.
lol. Just in the process of sending my annual £180 (£150+VAT) off to VT to prepare the bookkeeping and accounts for unlimited clients. Sure that Quickbooks users have an equally joyous time rolling around the floor and crying with laughter at those immortal words "And Sage users pay per client!" (sound effect of riotous laughter).
I've got nothing against Sage software which (like VT) one can either love or hate, but Sage's client tax licensing (now shared by cloud offerings) absolutely stinks.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I paid either £99 or £199 (can't remember which) for my Sage unlimited company, unlimited network users licence. There's obviously been a bit of inflation in the last 20+ years, but a lot of software prices have fallen in that time. I asked about an upgrade some years ago and they said something about £1,000. So I'm sticking with version 8, and will probably use VT! I don't think I want to know what current Sage prices are! The thing that drove me away from Sage was the letter where they said that us dealers had asked them to increase their prices, so they had. Well they never asked me if I wanted it priced out of the reach of my clients!
4.6.2. Company. By 'company', we mean a company, business or other organisation (which is in a group of businesses owned by the same person or people), which you want to manage using the Software, and for which you have a set of stand alone records and data (which we call a 'data set'). If you want to manage more than one company data set with the Software, you must have a company licence for each company data set that you want to manage. For clarity, when we say 'manage' in this clause it has a general meaning, to include for example: managing your finances e.g. by producing management and statutory accounts, and related financial information; managing your people, e.g. your HR records and payroll; managing your operations, e.g. your materials and projects; managing your interactions with your customers, suppliers and other business partners; and managing your future, e.g. with forecasting and reporting tools
So whilst you may physically be able to, such would actually be breaking the EULA.
The difference would be that when you are being taught I am assuming that a test dataset (which is all that the training companies are) does not fulfil the criteria of being a company per the recognition criteria of the EULA.
If any other interpretation were true then how would Sage be able to keep their share holders happy with the client tax?
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Of course there's the practical problem of keeping very careful track of the backups. Restore the wrong one, or forget to backup one company before restoring another, and the cost could far outweigh the savings by not buying the correct software. Maybe OK for domestic accounts, but not a good idea for business, where you could run up against irate suppliers, fine collecting tax men, and happy customers who you never chase for unpaid invoices!
Obviously I wasn't saying it would be a good idea to use for someone with a business with a large number of clients, hopefully if that were the case you would be in a position to afford sage 50 etc. I don't know a lot about the licence as I am still training just taken level 2 exams, but I was under the impression that it was more to do with one user and could only be loaded onto one computer. As for the training of using sage I was talking about for bookkeeping purposes when training with our professional bodies for our exams.
personally I think that the Sage business model is fundamentally wrong but they combine that with marketing that is near perfect (convince the market that there is no other option... Such is a lie of course but it's a lie that works).
The user part of the agreement I actually agree with in that you buy one copy for your use on one machine (You can also take it off one computer and put it onto another one provided that you get a transfer code from Sage).
That part of the agreement is pretty standard and shared by all players in the market.
Where Sage go totally wrong in my opinion is with the client tax.
The software exists on the same machine for the same time with the same number of people using it. Why should one pay more if they are potentially making more money from that software?
As I say, it's a client tax.
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Where does the "client tax" come in? I couldn't see it from a quick look at their web site. There's a price for the software, and optional Sage Cover, just as there was when I was selling it. The only difference I can see is that the prices are even more of a rip-off than the prices that drove me to stop selling it 10 years ago. My clients rarely took out Sage Cover, as they got such brilliant support from me!
The client tax is for Sage 50 and its when you are buying it you say how many clients you will be supporting in order to get a price.
They've actually changed their site now so you can't get a price for client manager without calling them. Last time that I looked though I thnk that the base price was about £900 for 25 clients. I could be wrong and sure someone more knowledgable about the current pricing will chip in to say what the current prices are.
Sage instant is only intended for one client so the client tax is not applicable in that instance... Well, unless you take the option of buying one copy of the software for every client that you service under it and that would make it more expensive even than Sage 50.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Charging a high price for blocks of clients isn't very helpful. It's only £36 per client, which isn't much to recover from them, if you have 25 clients, but when you're just starting out with a few clients, or presumably when you've got 26 clients, it's not helpful.
Compared to the £199 I paid around 1989 for my unlimited company, unlimited network users licence, that adjusted for inflation would be under £450 today, it's a complete rip-off. I was happy to pay that at the time, even though it was quite a lot of money, and I could have as many clients as I wanted, each with every previous financial year readily available. In fact I still could, for clients who don't (and never will) want to run Sage themselves.
So it doesn't seem that what Sage charge for has changed, it's just that their prices are no longer a bit premium, but reasonable.
As long as you have appropriate licensing, you can do this "trick" to switch between data sets.
Locate the company file Copy it call it co1 open instant, it will not find any data and prompt you to create a new company, make one. this will create a new company file. rename it co2
Write a batch file that copys the file co1 to company call it co1.bat do the same thing for co2
run the batch file for either company and when you open instant you will be using the company you ran the batch file for.
Company file is typically located at c:\Programdata\sage\accounts\2xxx\
when you copy, you want to overwrite the existing company file so use the /Y option on the copy command in your batch file eg:
-- Edited by BruceDenney on Friday 4th of July 2014 01:27:50 PM
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