Sage Accounting review 2025: the right fit for your small business?

Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK software company Sage has done an impressive job of giving its US-based competitors a run for their money as one of the best accounting software options for small businesses. Where Sage really stands out, though, is with its tailored solutions for your finances, and strong brand customisation.

Sage keeps things simple with three plans, which are aimed at sole traders, small business owners, and more advanced small businesses respectively. Sage aims to keep things simple, and it’s particularly adept at streamlining your day-to-day workflow.

Sage stands out for its modern-looking interface, but is it more than just a pretty face? We’ll go into detail about everything you need to know about this accounting software, including its strengths and weaknesses, and whether you’re getting your money’s worth.

How did we test and review Sage?

All of our reviews at Startups are the result of a rigorous and thorough testing process carried out by our own dedicated research department.

Sage was one of seven different accounting software platforms that we tested as part of a recent round of analysis.

This was comprised of industry-based insights and actual, hands-on user testing. This was spread across 1,512 total areas of investigation, which fell under six specific categories. 

These six categories were determined by our research executives as the most important, and relevant, factors to small business owners shopping for accounting software:

Primary features: these are the critical tasks that will be the foundation of your accounting software, such as invoicing and tax preparation. How well does Sage do the basics?

Planning and financial visibility: this sounds technical, but what it essentially boils down to is how well does Sage give you a clear, detailed understanding of your business’s financial health?

Daily efficiency: does Sage maximise your financial productivity? Does it make your life easier with a wide range of third-party integrations, and can you customise your workflow to your liking?

Help and support: what types of support does Sage provide if you run into trouble? How reliable is it, and what are the operating hours?

Pricing: how much is Sage charging you, and are you getting your money’s worth? Are there any hidden fees lurking to surprise you?

Usability: bookkeeping and financial planning can be complicated, so you’ll want a software that’s easy to use. Is Sage a headache to navigate, or is it user-friendly?

After 57 hours total of testing, we are confident about the recommendations we make about accounting software.

Now, let’s get into where Sage shines, where it could use some polish, and how much you’ll be spending on it. And, ultimately, if it’s the right purchase for you!

What’s it like to use Sage?

The one thing that immediately leaps out about Sage is how modern and slick the interface is. For example, compared to Xero (which looks like it was designed a number of years, or even decades, ago), Sage certainly has the look and feel of a 2025 accounting software. The aesthetic appeal of the software is thankfully also combined with some reasonably intuitive navigation.

Sage has a modern, appealing interface. Source: Startups.co.uk

When you first log into Sage you’ll be greeted by the main dashboard, which contains a summary of the most important metrics for your business. It has an appealing clean look, and makes it easy to view critical information like outstanding client payments at a mere glance. So, it undoubtedly looks the part, but what’s it like to use on a daily basis?

How easy is Sage to use?

We did run into a few pain points when using Sage. For one thing, locating important functions and features was occasionally more frustrating than it should have been. Finding where to set up payment reminders, switch to a different currency, or locate expense reporting proved to be surprisingly difficult.

Expense reporting was particularly cumbersome, and left many of our testers confused and frustrated. Unexpectedly, you need to go into the “Banking” section, go into the “New” drop down menu, select “Purchase/Payment”, and then manually enter the information. It felt like the process could be made a lot smoother.

Ultimately we had mixed feelings about Sage’s usability. It’s simple and nice to look at, and once you know where everything is, it’s reasonably easy to navigate around. But, at first glance, not everything is filed away where you assume it would be.

How much does Sage cost?

Sage’s pricing is pretty simple. There are only three plans to choose from, and there’s no contract to sign and no hidden fees. It’s very much what you see is what you get, and it’s reasonably clear to understand which plan would work best for you.

Accounting Start

Cost: £15 plus VAT per month

Who’s it for:

Accounting Start is primarily for sole traders, the self-employed who are registered for VAT (as it happens, Sage also ranked on our list of the best accounting software for the self-employed), and small business owners who deal in cash accounting and just need the absolute basics.

With Accounting Start, you can:

• Send unlimited sales invoices a year
• Calculate and submit VAT and be fully MTD (Making Tax Digital) compliant
• Get automated bank reconciliations to help simplify your records

Accounting Standard

Cost: £30 plus VAT per month

Who’s it for:

Accounting Standard is for small businesses that work with suppliers, need to submit CIS tax, or want to work in accrual mode accounting (as opposed to on a cash basis).

Accounting Standard lets you:

• Submit CIS tax directly to HMRC
• Keep track of how much you owe your suppliers with invoice management
• Send out quotes to customers
• Run cash flow forecasting and advanced reporting

Accounting Plus

Cost: £59 plus VAT per month

Who’s it for:

Accounting Plus is for small businesses that are doing business overseas, or have stock or an inventory of products to manage.

That’s because the key features here are:

• Inventory and stock management
• Out-of-stock warnings and stock limits
• Multi-currency invoicing and automatically updated exchange rates

So what Sage provides in simplicity, it’s arguably lacking in scalability. Competitors like QuickBooks and Zoho Books have a wider range of more nuanced plans that can support your business as it grows. You can read more in our complete guide to QuickBooks’ prices.

Sage does provide great value for money in one aspect, though: you can have unlimited users on the Accounting Plus plan. This is pretty good when you consider that even on QuickBooks’ most expensive plan (at £115 plus VAT per month) you only get a maximum of 25 users, and Zoho Books’ Ultimate plan (at £165 plus VAT per month) is limited to a mere 15 users.

In terms of basic cost, Sage is coming in at about average when stacked up against its industry contemporaries for the lower tier plan, and is coming in on the expensive side of things for the higher tiers. However, it is worth noting that you can currently get your first three months for free on any of its plans, which could be a great way of checking the software out at no cost.

You can compare all three plans against each other with our handy table:

Swipe right to see more

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Plan Accounting Start	Plan Accounting Standard	Plan Accounting Plus
Cost £15 per month (excl. VAT) First three months free	Cost £30 per month (excl. VAT) First three months free	Cost £59 per month (excl. VAT) First three months free

Is there a free plan?

If you’ve just started out on your business journey, it’s understandable that you’ll want to save on costs where you can. Unfortunately, Sage doesn’t have a free plan, but you can try any plan free of charge for three months. You can also jump over to our breakdown of the best free accounting software for small businesses.

Is Sage worth the money?

It might not be the cheapest solution, and while there are competitor plans that can offer similar features for a lower cost, we still think Sage is worth the money if you want to prioritise strong brand authority and want bespoke financial reports.

Are there any hidden costs?

There are no hidden costs or fees associated with Sage, so what you see is what you get, and there’ll be no unpleasant surprises taking an unexpected bite out of your budget.

You do have the option of adding Sage Payroll if you need it. This starts from £10 per month plus VAT for Payroll Essentials, which allows you to do essential HR admin. Then there’s Payroll Standard for £20 per month plus VAT, which allows you to manage timesheets. Finally there’s the Payroll Premium plan which starts from £30 per month plus VAT. This has advanced HR features like shift scheduling. Each plan covers five employees, with the option to add more for an additional fee.

Sage’s key features

Sage undoubtedly looks and feels modern, but that won’t amount to much if its capabilities aren’t up to scratch. Let’s put Sage’s tools and features under the spotlight and see what it can do for you:

Primary features

• Sage can do the basics that you’d expect from any decent software, like automating the sending of invoices and quotes, and setting up recurring invoices. Overall, the workflow for quoting and invoicing did stand out as a positive for being clear and easy to use. In particular the customisable templates for invoices. Invoice management in general stood out as pretty seamless.

We found the quoting system with Sage to be reassuringly simple. Source: Startups.co.uk

• Aside from these points, though, this is an area where Sage could perform a little stronger. Crucially, it can’t send automated payment reminders to clients with outstanding bills.There’s also no built-in time tracking functionality, which is a pretty big oversight.
• Sage also can’t save frequently used account codes, which is a shame, as small touches like these can really speed things up. And while Sage can import and export using CSV, attempting to upload an existing client list during our testing proved to be a real pain, as many of our users failed to successfully do it. You have to use Sage’s specific template, and from our experience it didn’t automatically convert the data, which could be very time consuming for a large client list.

Financial planning and visibility

• This is an area where Sage is more in its comfort zone, giving you cash flow projection tools that factor in both your outgoings and income. In addition to this, the customisable profit and loss statements make Sage a solid contender for businesses looking for clarity and control over their finances.
• Sage has built-in templates for income statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets, but you can also create custom reports that can be tailored to your business’s specific financial needs. You can modify the existing report templates to your specifications, or you can even create new ones from scratch.
• You can filter your reports by department, project, cost centre, or account. You can then export your reports via PDF or CSV, and include any embedded calculations. However, the only data that you can import into Sage to include in reports is your customer info, which is a bit limiting.

Day-to-day efficiency

• This is another area where Sage starts to flex its muscle. Sage can manage multiple delivery addresses for your clients, which can then be included on your invoices and shipping documents. You can also set spending permissions and approvals for different departments.
• Where Sage really stands out, though, is with brand customisation on your documents. Invoices, quotes, and reports can all be heavily customised, with a range of options for changing the style, colour, and CTAs, and adding in your own bespoke logo.

The customisability of Sage’s external documents is one of its biggest strengths. Source: Startups.co.uk

• So, if you’re sending out external documents to your clients and customers, they can be edited to fit seamlessly with your own branding, which could be important to companies who are looking to establish themselves with a client base.
• As we mentioned in the pricing section, you’ll get unlimited users on Accounting Plus. This is a pretty sizable bonus, considering many competitors limit your users and make you pay extra to add more, for example FreshBooks, which charges £8 per additional user.
• There’s also an app marketplace with 99 integrations for you to connect to your Sage Accounting software, including seamless payroll integration if you need to manage paying your employees.

What’s Sage’s help and support like?

Overall, we found ourselves reasonably impressed with the range of Sage’s help and support. You can get support via:

• Phone: available from 8am to 8pm on weekdays.
• Live chat with a real person: available 8am to 6pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm at the weekend
• Live chat with a bot 24/7
• Community forum
• Knowledge centre
• Online materials such as video tutorials and webinars

However, we do have a gripe with the effectiveness of the knowledge centre. Our users expressed concern about the responses they were given when trying to use the knowledge centre, as they were often unclear or unhelpful.

You can rest assured, though, that Sage is fully GDPR compliant and PCI compliant, so your sensitive information is in good hands. It also offers automatic cloud backups for your data.

Who is Sage best for?

The slick workflow for invoicing and quoting makes Sage Accounting a good fit for service-based businesses such as builders, contractors, handymen, catering services, personal trainers, and more. Essentially, anyone who needs to regularly manage lots of quotes, and needs an easy-to-manage invoicing system.

Sage gives you a summary of all your key metrics. Source: Startups.co.uk

Product-based businesses with stock inventory, like wine merchants, jewelers, or clothing retailers could also certainly use Sage, but just keep in mind that you could arguably get these same features cheaper from another software, such as Zoho Books. 

We would advise that more established businesses with high sales volumes might find that Sage is lacking the more advanced and sophisticated financial management tools that they’ll need. For example, the overly complex expense management system would be a frustration for larger businesses that need to process a large number of transactions.

The verdict

The tools for tailoring your external documents to fit with your business’s visual style, including their CTAs, will be great for brand-conscious businesses. However, just be aware that Sage might be lacking the advanced functionality needed by more sophisticated SMEs with large client bases and high turnovers.

For example, Sage could provide a far more seamless option for bulk import functionality for customers and contacts. Similarly, other competitors, like Xero, offer better options for bulk expense uploads. The lack of time tracking functionality will also be a potential miss for some businesses.

The positives are that Sage has a nice, super-clear, modern design, and it’s easy to navigate around. Its invoicing and quoting workflow works pretty seamlessly, and if you want customisable document templates, this will definitely be worth your consideration.

Read next: our comprehensive review of QuickBooks.