Updates to Sage Accounting and Sage Payroll that can help your business thrive in 2022

Businesses across the country have experienced uncertainty and numerous challenges over the past year. But despite that, they’ve shown resilience to keep driving forward and provide their customers with value.

At Sage, we’re here to do the same for you.

We always strive to ensure you’re equipped for what’s happening both now and in the future, so your business can succeed. From freeing up your time, to making processes smoother, we’re here to instil the confidence required to run your business, with help from our regular Sage product updates.

We’ve collaborated with our customers and accountants to ensure they have the right solutions to meet their needs. And we’ll continue to enhance our products so they can help you as your requirements change.

We addressed some of the valuable feedback we received on our Sage Accounting and Sage Payroll products, and created updates that align with changing legislation to take the stress out of admin.

In this article, we cover the updated features that you can use in your Sage products so your business can thrive in 2022.

Here’s what we cover:

Sage Accounting highlights

• Manage your banking more flexibly
• Invoice and template customisation just got easier
• Search and manage your information faster
• Updated Brexit and EU legislation to help you get your accounts right
• Supporting you with the next phase of Making Tax Digital
• Keeping track of your accounts with automated journal entry creation
• AutoEntry invoice number mapping

Sage Payroll highlights

• Effective payroll prep for year-end processing
• Better management of employees through payroll
• Put the power in your employees’ hands with self-serve payslips

What to look forward to in 2022

• Improved flexibility and compliance for Sage Accounting
• Enhanced features for Sage Payroll

Final thoughts

Sage Accounting highlights

Here’s a round-up of updates to Sage Accounting…

Manage your banking more flexibly

To streamline bank reconciliation and transactions further, we updated several banking features in Sage Accounting to give you more clarity and flexibility.

Now you can apply bank rules to transactions to automate processes such as bulk deleting and importing, categorising transactions, and copying and importing rules between accounts.

Bank reconciliation is made simpler with the relocation of the reconcile button to make this more accessible from a bank account.

Unused bank accounts can also be hidden to neaten up your bank list, giving you room for greater focus on your active accounts.

If you’re a Sage Accounting Plus subscriber working across international markets, multi-currency banking is available, enabling you to consolidate your banking for a more comprehensive view of your business.

The update allows you to add bank accounts in currencies other than your base currency, select and toggle between accounts, and transfer funds all from once place.

Invoice and template customisation just got easier

The needs, goals and branding of every business is different, which is why our customers value customisation highly.

With Sage Accounting, you can customise invoices to ensure they reflect your brand.

This includes the ability to update logos, templates, labels and headings on new invoices, as well as the email copy sent to your customers.

These can be saved for future use, saving you valuable time, and giving you more control of your finance communications.

To check your invoice reflects your preferences, you can quickly preview invoices before you send them and view import errors that have been flagged, allowing you to quickly amend any issues.

“Listening to customers’ feedback helps us identify critical problems we can solve, ensuring we focus on the things that can have the biggest impact.

“This in turn, improves our customers’ and accountants’ businesses and end-to-end process, which will help them to save time, simplify, and automate their core business process with increased accuracy and assurance that they’re getting it right, every time, then creating the space to proactively manage and grow their business.”

Neal Watkins, EVP Small Segment, Sage

Search and manage your information faster

You can quickly find the contacts and transactions you’re looking for more readily in search fields using less information.

By inputting details such as transaction numbers, partial email addresses, telephone numbers or primary names, you can quickly and easily find what you need – even if you don’t have all the information to hand.

Updated Brexit and EU legislation to help you get your accounts right

Sage Accounting was updated to support legislation changes due to Brexit.

Due to changes in tax and transaction types in 2021, updates were made to ensure payments, receipts, VAT, bank rules, and more are aligned with the latest legislation.

Trading abroad?

You’ll be pleased to know this included an automatic way to add European Union (EU) Goods and Services to invoices, minimising the time spent adding these yourself.

You can also charge destination VAT on sales to EU customers who aren’t VAT registered using the applicable rates and be included in your reports, giving you a complete One Stop Shop for VAT Returns.

These changes also apply to the way invoices are managed for contractors and subcontractors under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS).

To help you manage the changes, we’ve automatically updated all VAT registered contracts to use reverse charge VAT within Sage Accounting, ensuring all invoices will have these charges applied.

Supporting you with the next phase of Making Tax Digital

Making Tax Digital (MTD) is already transforming the way VAT-registered businesses manage their accounting for the better by using digital accounting to take control of business finance issues such as cash flow and forecasting.

Been impacted by MTD?

We’ve ensured you can submit your VAT Returns digitally through our products and have access to resources to make this easy.

And with the next phase of MTD for VAT applying to all VAT-registered businesses from April 2022 (with VAT-registered businesses under the VAT threshold having to adhere to the rules for the first time), if this applies to you, Sage Accounting will ensure you can submit your VAT Returns with ease.

Our updates continue to allow you to remain complaint with MTD for VAT, and we are here to further support you no matter your business requirements.

Keeping track of your accounts with automated journal entry creation

We’ve made it easier to add journals to Sage Accounting with a new import feature that takes the toil out of manually creating journals.

Ledger adjustments in your spreadsheets can also be imported as journals as you see fit.

AutoEntry invoice number mapping

We’ve listened to your needs to help solve some of the more complex challenges of creating transactions in Sage Accounting, such as invoice numbers populating incorrect fields when purchase invoices are created.

Our AutoEntry integration now has the capability to create transactions from scans or images, so details from your documents will map to like transaction details in AutoEntry, ensuring consistency across your records.

Sage Payroll highlights

And here’s a round-up of updates to Sage Payroll…

Effective payroll prep for year-end processing

The end of the tax year is the period in which most businesses require additional support, so efficiency and accuracy is important to help teams transition into a new tax year as smoothly as possible.

We’re here to help you beat the rush to complete the payroll year end process by keeping all our products up to date, allowing for seamless rollover into the new tax year.

You can update pay calendars for the following year to process pay runs ahead of 2022 alongside being already set-up to accommodate yearly updates such as payment increases and changes in legislation.

Better management of employees through payroll

We’ve made it easier for you to manage your employees in Sage Payroll with new import features and subscription options.

You can process payroll for up to 100 employees with the addition of two new subscription options to suit your business.

So if your business grows, you can simply upgrade your subscription to add new employees rather than needing to speak to someone or purchase a new product.

If you’re making the switch from another software solution, you can now import employees using a Full Payment Submission (FPS) file to save time on inputting team manually, making setting up payroll smoother and more efficient.

Put the power in your employees’ hands with self-serve payslips

With our Sage Payroll app, your team can quickly and easily view and download their own payslips and P60s.

This gives everyone easy access to their documents online at any time that suits, saving you the hassle and environmental cost of printing or emailing them.

Set them up, and let your team self-serve, freeing up your time and theirs.

What to look forward to in 2022

As we continue to evolve our accounting and payroll products to meet your needs, we’re here to support you with efficiency, balance and growth.

By leaving us to streamline your admin, you’ll have more time to focus on what you do best.

Here are just some of the features coming to Sage Accounting and Sage Payroll in 2022 – and we look forward to sharing more soon.

Improved flexibility and compliance for Sage Accounting

You can look forward to additional enriched visibility for Sage Accounting.

This will include further flexibility to reports that will reduce the time you spend on gathering insights while providing you with a richer understanding of your performance.

This will give you the context required to make more informed business decisions.

And we’re here to help you meet the requirements of MTD for VAT.

Enhanced features for Sage Payroll

In the coming months, in Sage Payroll, you can look forward to updates to pensions, including automated salary sacrifices to reduce the risk of errors when pension filing and keep payslips up to speed.

There will also be updates to departmental reporting and additional functionality that will make processing larger numbers of employees much easier.

This is perfect if you’re running a growing business and are looking to expand your operations in 2022.

Final thoughts

As 2022 continues, we’ll be here to support you with further updates that will help you stay on top of your accounting and payroll tasks.

Make sure you keep up to date with our latest product updates:

• Sage Accounting Product Updates
• Sage Payroll Product Updates