The Power of Blogs - Sage Part 2

The power of blogging fairly hit home today when we received a telephone call from accounting software giant Sage. Readers may have read a previous post on this blog from April 10th, when we were experiencing problems generating our end of year employee P60 and P14 forms.

We eventually had to pay for support cover from Sage for them to look into our problem which turned out to be because we were running Payroll for 2005 and not the 2006 version, hence causing some technicality problems when generating new employee returns for the year end 2006 - something which we did not anticipate happening, since we only bought the package in March 2006, one month before the new tax year began.

Anyway, we payed for Support Cover and within an hour, we had downloaded the updates from Sage and the problem was fixed.

Today however, we received a phone call from Sage regarding our previous post on this blog.

Now half expecting a rollicking from Sage, because we had blogged about them, I put on my tin hat and body armour and spoke to a gentleman called Mike Green.

But my expectation of a telling off could not halve been further from the truth.

Seemingly Sage trawl the web, looking to see what people are saying about their company. They had come across my blog post and after reading about the problems that we were encountering, called us up to offer advice. Before they knew that we had already upgraded, they kindly told us that the problem that we seemed to be having, was likely to be linked to an out of date Sage package and they recommended we upgrade.

Now, I'm sure like all company's Sage have various policy's and ways of working (eg support prices and call waiting times) that can irritate people at times, but in this instance I would say that in calling us today deserves 100% praise for this type of customer service.

Sage were more than happy that I was discussing my issues with their software online, which in turn allowed them to find out the problems people were having, allowing them to seek to address these problems, either by calling us like today or by using the feedback to enhance future software releases.

So there you have it, a small company in Stirling, starting a blog only a few weeks ago and already we have had the mighty Sage knocking on our door.

Before I sign off - once again well done Sage and Mike Green for your foresight in calling today.

Sage P60 problems

Like a lot of companies its end of tax year time, so our accounts staff have been busy doing all the necessary tasks. This year we thought we would take advantage of the Inland Revenues incentive to file our employees end of year returns (P60 & P14) online straight from our Sage Package which is Instant Accounts Plus. If you file the forms online you will receive a £150 reduction from your employer return this year and £100 next year, so we decided to register and look forward to paying the government less for once.

But alas, no such luck. We started two new employees within the last tax year and even though they appear on every other report in Sage , when you print the P60 report (which goes to the employee and the P14 which gets sent online to the Inland Revenue), the forms for these two employees are not generated, so we have no P60's to give to the employees and the Inland Revenue will not accept the online sending of the forms because it knows the forms are missing.

Sage want nearly £100 of our money just to speak to us, yes we found this out after being on hold for 45 minutes today on the phone. Even though we are sure everything has been done correctly when we created these employees into sage when they started, it all points to a sage glitch but they are not having it. So it will be back to the drawing board tomorrow to find out if we can find a fix ourselves, or most of the governments first years £150 incentive will unfortunately be on its way to Sage just so they can say - "hello welcome to Sage - how can we help you solve your problem"