Sage North America today introduced Sage One U.S., its first pure SaaS-based entry-level accounting and business management product for the U.S. market.
The product is aimed at sole proprietors, freelancers and entrepreneurs with less than 10 employees, and is designed to run accounting and other business functions from any Internet access point.
Specifically, Sage One U.S. is designed to bring together money management, invoicing, project tracking, task assignment, messaging and reporting in a single integrated Web-based application. While the product is available now, Sage claims it will continue to take user feedback to help it evolve.
In its design, there was some code base taken from Sage One UK -- a similar SaaS product the company released in that market early last year - but it was mainly built "from scratch," according to Sage One U.S. product manager Mike Savory.
"What we were finding was that even our lowest-end accounting product [Peachtree] was too much for many businesses. They needed to manage things a bit more than bookkeeping, but not as much as Peachtree can do, and oftentimes people didn't know what they were doing with it," said Savory. "We saw a real opportunity. ... Our long-term goal is going to be simplicity, and now we have a source for small businesses to do payment processing, accountant access, project tracking, employee management, customer management all in the cloud."
Sage One U.S. is available direct from Sage for $29 per month, which includes two administrative users, unlimited collaborative users, and 5 GB of storage. Subscriptions also includes online and phone support.
To celebrate the launch of Sage One U.S., new customers can subscribe for just $1 per month for the first three months. They can sign up for a free 30-day trial, after which users can elect to subscribe for $1 per month for an additional three months and then continue to subscribe for $29 per month.
Accountants have already been invited to view and try out the product for free, and it is expected there will be a specific accountant edition released next year, according to Connie Certusi, executive vice president and general manager, small business solutions, Sage North America.
"We've been getting good feedback from [accountants], and they view this as a positive for clients not on anything or even on Peachtree. It's very much for the 'shoebox' clients," she said.
