Accountancy software firm Sage has unveiled its latest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that the company claims marks a significant milestone in its move to become a cloud player.
The service, which is aimed primarily at SMBs and sole traders and their accountants, builds on the Sage One platform, which was launched in 2011.
New features include automatic currency exchange calculation, VAT calculation for transactions with non-UK and Ireland based businesses, greater control over who can manage payment and receipts, quick transaction input processing, and cash flow statements and forecasting.
Furthermore, multiple users can access and use the service at the same time, which was not possible before.
This is not the first update to the cloud-based Sage One service, which has already seen additional features, such as Payroll and optional add-ons introduced over the course of the past two years.
However, Nick Goode, head of Sage One Europe told journalists that Accounts Extra represents “the next generation of Sage as a business” and told Cloud Pro Sage One as a whole had been architected to facilitate the Newcastle-based firm’s global expansion.
As with the rest of Sage One, Accounts Extra is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) facilities with European customers’ data being hosted in the company’s Dublin and London data centres.
Goode told Cloud Pro that part of the reason the company had chosen to use AWS was due to its high availability and resilience.
“Data sovereignty, security and availability are top priorities for us because they are the top priorities of our customers,” he said.
“We are not worried that Amazon is going to go down or disappear, and we have full safe harbour agreements in place with them,” Goode added.
