Sage Financials Will No Longer Be Available To New Customers

Over the last few weeks, Sage has announced that it’s Sage Financials, accounting for Salesforce application will no longer be available to new customers. Of course, that begs the question, where does that leave existing Sage Financials customers and partners?

Once you use the Salesforce cloud, you fall in love with the power and flexibility of the platform. And think “What else can we do on Salesforce”?  You look at the multiple, legacy business applications you have and wonder if you could replace those with apps on the Salesforce platform. Legacy accounting and finance systems seem like perfect candidates for migration to the Salesforce platform, so that your whole lead to cash process is streamlined in one, collaborative, mobile platform.

Sage perhaps had been smitten by Salesforce, in much the same way that most of are smitten by the software and community too. Not only had Sage decided to deploy Salesforce internally, it also decided to build a product for the Salesforce AppExchange.  In other words, no point Sage trying to beat Salesforce in the CRM and Service space, Sage may as well join forces with Salesforce.  Was this a clear signal to the market that Sage had surrendered the battle for SMB CRM to Salesforce? Is it also a clear message to Sage customers that the right solution to buy for your business is Salesforce?  

We certainly believe Salesforce is the best business platform for customers. It makes complete sense that if you was to purchase a new system,  you would want one business system to run your entire company.  That’s where the power of Salesforce and the Salesforce app store, AppExchange provide tremendous value to customers.

85% Of Sage Customer Are Running Accounting On Desktop Software.

Sage has struggled to deliver a SaaS platform and transform itself from a traditional on premise software company.  Will Sage ever have the cash and the skills to deliver a SaaS platform, rather than a bunch of fragmented cloud based apps?  If it does not, how will it survive the disruption of the cloud coming it’s way.  Will Sage continue to try to acquire it’s way to the cloud or will that just add to the confused product portfolio? If Sage does not migrate it’s customers to the cloud, then who will? 

Sage probably knew, sooner or later, Salesforce would be penetrating deep into the heart of Sage’s customer base, the small and medium business (SMB).  Many of those SMB customers are stuck in a legacy world. Sage itself is claiming that 85% of it’s customers run accounting on desktop software.  Many of those SMB customers probably do not have a CRM yet or have adopted multiple cloud applications to meet specific business needs.  In essence, migrating data silos from on premise systems, to data silos in the cloud.  Perhaps it’s time for those Sage customers to consolidate their business systems to a single cloud provider? 

Many Sage customer s are already migrating away from Sage legacy desktop accounting products to more powerful, cloud based accounting applications such as Xero or Kashlow.  Salesforce has also launched new, super attractive CRM/ and Service offerings for small businesses called Salesforce Essentials. As we all know, it’s only a matter of time before every business migrates all applications to the cloud. Sage has some serious issues defending itself from having the competition gobble up it’s core customers.

In this context, it makes complete sense for Sage to partner with Salesforce, use the Salesforce platform  internally (preferring to do so over its’ own CRM/Service products) and then package an offering for it’s customers. The manifestation of this idea was launched to the market as Sage Life. 

Early market feedback on the Sage Life was particularly poor, citing over engineering, complexity of deployment and lack of stability or even worse, it just didn’t work on the Salesforce platform. After a few iterations of various pricing and packaging offerings, Sage rebranded the product as Sage Live.  There were still increasing negative reviews and some even being removed from the AppExchange listing of Sage Live. Well, it was time to rebrand again to Sage Financials (hmmmm, wonder where Sage got the inspiration for that brand???). Another rebranding did not solve the problems for Sage Financials and the negative reviews continued, some customers even claiming they had to resort to legal action against Sage to get refunds for Sage Financials.

“What Is The Future Of Accounting In Salesforce ?”

By the end of February 2018, Sage had announced to it’s partner channel in the UK that it was no longer selling Sage Financials to new customers, instead it would focus on Sage Intaact, an acquisition Sage made the previous year.  Apparently, this announcement came out of the blue at a partner meeting, literally, as of that day, Sage was no longer willing to take orders for the product. We first learned of the news via the Sage Financials Know How  web site on the 28th of February and later from the Brightnon Salesforce User Group (BSUG) . The BSUG originally had a meetup planned to discuss Sage Financials, which it later scrambled to retitle “What is the future of accounting in Salesforce ?”.  

Some reports out there claimed that Sage had already stopped selling the product to US customers some time earlier in 2018 and had only just made the announcement in the UK.

More recently, Sage has removed the Sage Financials product from it’s own website and has now also delisted the AppExchange listing, although you are able to still find it by searching on Google.

If you are an existing Sage Financials customer, who has invested thousands in licenses and services to implement an accounting application on Salesforce, how will you feel when you realise the product you have struggled with for the past three years, has no future?

Perhaps those customers are yet to realise that they are in a dead end product with Sage Financials.

Pent Up Demand To Implement Accounting And Finance On The Salesforce Platform

Already there are customers and partners scrambling to look for alternatives to satisfy the pent up demand to implement accounting and finance on the Salesforce platform. Some were close to making the purchase decision or mid evaluation and others are classic Sage partners, who have invested thousands gearing up to sell and implement Sage Financials. Sage will find it pretty difficult to regain the credibility and trust required to work with these customers and partners.

Fortunately, many of those customer are loyal to Salesforce and even the new Sage partners that have found their way to the Salesforce Ohana have been smitten by the platform and would prefer to stay and grow with the company and share in the success.  So it makes sense for those customers and partners to search for an alternative accounting and finance system for Salesforce.

Zumzum Financials, SMB Accounting For Salesforce To The Rescue.

Clearly, the benefits of having a single business system for marketing, sales, service, accounting and finance, built 100% native on the Salesforce platform are compelling for SMB customers. 

Fortunately, Zumzum Financial, SMB accounting for Salesforce, available on the Salesforce AppExchange, is designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses.  Zumzum Financials is  easy to install, simple to configure and extremely powerful to automate and streamline the most complex finance processes.

Download your free trial from the AppExchange now.