Sage or Quickbooks - for retail and Ecommerce - what do you use?

Sage, Quickbooks, Retail, Ecommerce

[guitarslinger]

Hi Guys - just wondering whether you had any experience in using the above in an internet mail order and retail based evironment. All internet orders go through the shop.

From what i can see, i think i need an add on to sage - sage "retail" to get a decent retail POS. Whereas quickbooks on the surface seems to offer this inbuilt. Any ideas?

[Deab]

We use Quickbooks for our (online only) store, and I find it very confusing - but I'm not an accountant.

[oddsod]

I've been severely disappointed with Sage. I asked all the right pre-purchase questions and bought Sage. It's only then I discovered that Sage doesn't have some of the basic features one would expect of an accountancy package. I was stunned, particularly as Sage is pretty much the grand-daddy of accounting packages. I was advised I needed to go up to the next level up so I upgraded and was extremely annoyed to find that I was misinformed... apparently we neeeded to go up to their pretty much top of the range, enterprise version. So I upgraded again to a package costing several thousand pounds. I was still being misled as even that didn't work. That was a very costly mistake in the time I spent overall on Sage.

If for no other reason I'd say don't buy Sage because you can't trust what their sales people tell you about features and what the program supports. I wouldn't say they are deceptive but they are certainly at least misinformed. Very disappointing. And, their talk about listening to customers and improving from feedback is, I feel, largely BS. They've released two new versions since and neither of those has that basic issue corrected.

[Phil_C]

I chose Quickbooks and I'm pretty happy with it. I have a background of "big" ERP systems development (JD Edwards) which helped in my understanding.

It has a sales order entry bit, but it's hopeless for retail and quick entry sales.

I use a bespoke SOP system then use Quickbooks ODBC driver to interface the sales receipts into Quickbooks which works well.

My accountant reckons QB is much easier to use than Sage.

[Jack_Hughes]

quickbooks doesn't calculate sales tax correctly, it is quite often a penny out?!

having said that, I do believe that it is amongst the easiest to use. though, that isn't saying very much, accounts packages range from the impossibly cryptic to merely very hard to use. i can always tell when my co-founder is tusling with the accounts. he's not normally a swearer.

[guitarslinger]

I see - interesting stuff - i've used both a little and feel quickbooks is easier, although i hate the stock control features on there! However, it is liveable i guess.

In terms of using it as a back end for retail - someone mentioned OBDC, or something =0) Can anyone recommend a good "front end" piece of software/system to take sales in store? I won't have time to enter everyones info into a QB sales receipt i wouldn't have thought. =0).

Suggestions?

[Philip_M]

We are a retail shop (T/O c.£350K) with limited sales to trade customers. We keep our books (and have done for 10 years or so) on Quicken for DOS Version 3.4. It is entirely satisfactory in every way, with easy report generation. We use the cheque writing feature using pre-printed cheques. Quicken for Windows is too much home-user orientated, with too many useless bells and whistles such as home inventory and share valuations/tracking.

[Phil_C]

Quickbooks, not Quicken!

[GarryBoyd]

I've been using Sage line 50 for a couple of years now. Seemed like what I needed at the time, but its horrible. It frustrates and irritates me on a daily basis because of quirky little things.