World's worst software (Sage Payroll)

Member Name: fjpickett

Product:	Sage Payroll
Date:	04/09/00 (997 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easier than doing it by hand (just)

Disadvantages: Expensive, difficult to configure and use

I wrote this originally as a comment, but got carried away!

In my view, any payroll software will save time and trouble, which is probably why people who haven't used anything else think that Sage is OK - indeed, I would say that payroll is the application that users are most enthusiatic about when they've switched from doing wages manually, but I think that the current version of Sage is clunky and horrible.

Their backup is pretty crummy, too, and we keep finding things that it won't do (like print the payslips in your preferred order). We had a lot of problems at the beginning of the financial year, and were regularly kept waiting for 10-15 minutes on the phone, despite having paid £300 for the 'hot-line' cover.

We used to use the DOS version, which had some limitations, but was fast and in many respects easier to use than the Windows one. Because your hands are always switching from the keyboard to the mouse, the Windows version is much slower to operate, and it adds at least an hour to the entry of our data. We also had to redesign all our old reports, as the Windows version wouldn't read the DOS ones!

Sage is dominant in this area for the same reason that Microsoft is - it's been well marketed and is known to most accountants, who recommend it simply because they've heard of it. Nothing to do with merit.

Other packages, such as Freeway Payroll, are much cheaper and easier to drive, and have better backup. In fact, almost any would probably be better than the Sage offering!

2001 update - the new version for this tax year has a few amendments, most noticeable of which is that installing it promptly loses all the report layouts that you had carefully set up for the previous version! Well, it doesn't actually erase them, but you have to know where they've gone (and more importantly, that the new ones may be different). We first spotted this when trying to print payslips
on Sage's own stationery! This necessitated a call to the helpline, which entailed quarter of an hour on hold... God, I hate this program.

Note for Instant Payroll users (the cut-down version for small businesses) - whatever you do, don't try to install the new version to run in parallel with your old one. Everything will appear OK until you try to access your original data, when you will find that it has been overwritten by the new records. Good, eh?

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