An alternative approach: Rather than attempt to get another licence/add another user on a separate computer, would it not be possible to simply obtain a copy licensed for a single user - install that on your computer, and keep the bookkeeping separate from the current installation, which is used for the invoicing?

Ideally, the invoicing data would be periodically exported from the existing system and imported into the bookkeeping one so that it is kept up to date.

This is broadly similar to what I do with a client - except in this case, with Sage: They have four licensed copies of Sage Instant, which they use for invoicing, with a backup shared via Dropbox: One user at a time is designated the live user.

At month end, I'm sent a CSV file of the invoice summary for the month (because I only need the bottom lines), which is imported into their data in my Sage 50.

In the example I gave above, the only thing the client does in their copy of Sage Instant is to raise invoice - which they (mostly) do at the end of the month. An invoice might itself contain many, many lines of transactions. They email the actual invoices to the customers after raising them - sending me the summary (which I'll give more details on below).

All details of money received from customers come to me to input into *my* Sage - so it's *only* the invoices/credits that are imported from the client. They don't put anything else in their copy of Sage.

I therefore keep track of debtors (and send out statements once per month and/or when customers request them) - although one of the company's directors does the more nitty gritty debt chasing. Whenever he asks for an update, I email him a PDF report showing all of the outstanding invoices, with customer contact details etc.

If a customer replies to a statement asking for copies of missing invoices, I forward that to the director who then arranges for the copy invoice to be sent from their Sage, because I don't have the full invoice.

So, the invoice summary file... it's *based* on one of the default reports, but modified slightly. If you go to the invoice list screen, then to reports, in the "Invoice Details" section, there should be one called "Invoice Summary" - that's the one I started with.

That one shows columns for Invoice number, type, date, account, name, amount, processed and posted. I deleted type, processed and posted, and added columns for net and vat - saving the result as "Invoice summary (with VAT)".

An invoice might have multiple lines on (for this company, an invoice can be several pages long) - but that summary shows only the bottom line. So an invoice with 25 individual lines, each showing something sold for £10 + VAT, on the summary would show as a single line with a total of £250 plus VAT.

I've also added email settings to the report, so that rather than run and save it as a CSV file, they can just email it to me as a CSV file with a single click - but that's by the by.

When I receive that CSV file, I do need to modify it slightly so that it contains the right format data. (For example, it needs a two letter transaction type - SI or SC; most lines are SI, but if a line has a minus value, it gets changed to positive, and the type is SC. Also, a tax code is needed - usually T1, but sometimes Tn where n is the tax code for reverse charge euro-customers, which I've now forgotten!)

Once that's done, I tell Sage to import it.

If there are any customer account references it doesn't recognise - new customers - it won't import the file, and gives me a list of them. I then create the customer accounts provisionally (I don't have their full details at this point) and run the import again; this time they're imported.

I then send the list of new customers back to the director that does the invoicing - and he sends me the records for those customers as a CSV file. I then import that to fill in those customers records.

What you describe, though - if I'm reading it correctly - is much more complicated. It sounds like the two residential sites are doing a lot more in Sage than just the invoices, so you have more than just SI and SC transactions to import (if you were to go down this route).

This would be quite problematic because:

(a) there isn't an easy 'export' option in Sage - it amounts to modifying the report (in this case it'll be an audit trail report) to produce the right information for you to import,

(b) not all the types of transaction that would appear in the export can be imported. PP and SR, for example, which are the purchase ledger payments and sales ledger receipts that are allocated against invoices when they are input. All such transactions would have to be changed to PA and SA respectively (payments/receipts 'on account') before importing - and then you'd need to allocate them against the invoices manually (duplicating work that has already been done).

(c) you would almost certainly have control/balance sheet accounts duplicated in the three sets of Sage: for example, do the residential sites have their own bank accounts? If so, I bet they're both using the default 1200 - which you probably are for the office as well. Here, you would have to modify the data for importing so that such clashes don't occur.

(d) other stuff that I haven't thought of - the above are just examples.

"quite problematic" isn't the same as impossible, of course - it would be possible to write a program to automate *some* of the above (changing PP to PA, SR to SA, changing residential site 1's bank code to (say) 12001, and site 2's to 12002, and so on) - but you'd still have to duplicate someone else's work allocating those PA/SAs, and whatever else I haven't thought of re (d).

TBH, I'd suggest you're better off either:

(a) extracting summarised information from the two residential site's copies of Sage and either importing that (which would probably still require some data manipulation) or posting it manually as journals.

or

(b) extracting summarised information from all three Sages - the two residential sites, and the head office - and amalgamating it in a spreadsheet.

I suspect (b) is what you're probably doing now - though whether the exact approach your taking could be bettered, I don't know. On the whole, though, I'd recommend *against* attempting to import whole data sets from multiple copies of Sage into just one.