Sage Instant Payroll is something that we've used at my company for years. The directors used to do a run and pay people ad-hoc -- often missing several months out. But Instant Payroll coped with this. We also had to pay for SageCover -- £100 a year -- in order to get updates. However this seemed like poor value when we discovered that it didn't include more than telephone support (which we hardly ever used), a booklet telling you how to do the end-of-year, and a booklet with PAYE numbers to type in whenever Gordon Brown made his annual raid on our wallets.
A couple of years ago we dumped it. This was because we had to re-enter all the data at the end of year -- they hadn't checked that it actually worked!
But the HMRC calculators didn't do the job, so we bought another copy back in May. The interface is a bit weird. Worse, it had a bug so that you couldn't register the programme, and we had to ring up and ask for help. We didn't buy SageCover this time, until we were sure we were going to use it.
We ran the payroll then, and it seemed OK. Then we left it. But last week we needed to run it again. And... we couldn't. The damn thing just sat there. Our employees that we needed to pay simply would not appear in the list of employees to pay. They were there in Instant Payroll, but we couldn't pay them.
It looks as if Instant Payroll requires you to run a payroll run every month, whether you need to or not. This is a real problem for a small firm, which doesn't need to do this. Of course if you do a run paying nothing each month, you end up with a pile of payslips for your people and have to manually total the lot up to work out what to pay to who. This is NOT what you buy a software package for.
We were a bit cross at this. So we emailed Sage, customer relations and technical support. We accepted that we had no contract, and that we were out of the 30-day warranty period. But on the other hand we plainly had only just bought it, and didn't want to pay another fee to get it to work (if it could be got to work -- we don't know).
Sage didn't respond. No reply whatsoever. No doubt they felt that they had our money and we could go to hell.
All this suggests that Sage is in trouble. If they had any business sense at all, they should be ringing us up and trying to sell us something to get us out of our problem. (Indeed endless sales calls from SageCover is something I remember well). An unhappy customer can be turned into a delighted customer if you know your job. An angry customer can be turned into a customer for life if you keep your cool. But no customer thinks highly of a firm who ignore emails. I've read in the press that their profits have been taking a hit, and perhaps the firm really is in trouble.
So we won't be using Sage ever again for anything. They ripped us off; but never again. What we've decided to do is to ring up their competitors and make sure that the product will do the job. At the moment Tasbooks and MYOB are in the frame. If their product will help us, we'll use it. If their 'cover plans' give us something useful, we'll buy them.
Anyone want to buy a copy of Sage Instant Payroll?
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