Sage Accounting and Sage Payroll updates to 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

• Automate journal entry creation
• Improved banking automation
• Multi-currency banking

Sage Payroll highlights

• Taking the stress out of compliance
• Engage your people with payslip messages
• New reports to help you keep on top of things

What to look forward to

• Smarter reporting capabilities for Sage Accounting
• 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…

Automate journal entry creation

We’ve made it easier for you to add journals to Accounting with the new journal entries import feature. This saves you the hassle of manually creating journals.

For example, you can import ledger adjustments you’ve got in a spreadsheet as journals.

You may also need to regularly import totals from another system (such as point of sale or payroll) as journals.

When preparing your file, you decide how journals are created for your business. Create individual journals per entry or one journal for several entries, all in the same file.

Improved banking automation

We’ve made it easier for you to import bank transactions in a way that suits your business. Plus, save time by applying bank rules to automatically create transactions.

More flexibility importing transactions

Once your statement has been uploaded you can also:

• Apply bank rules to transactions to automate the process, saving you time
• Bulk-delete any duplicate transactions before importing them.

Automate bank rules

Bank rules will automatically categorise and set details on incoming bank transactions with the conditions you choose. You can now:

• Apply bank rules to bank feeds and imported transactions
• Copy and import rules between accounts – no need to recreate them manually.

Multi-currency banking

We’ve added to multi-currency banking* to make it easier for you to do business in other countries. You can now:

• Add bank accounts in currencies other than your base currency
• Select bank accounts in other currencies when creating transactions
• Toggle between currencies when reviewing bank account activity
• Revaluate bank accounts, showing gains and losses
• Transfer funds between bank accounts with different currencies
• Create journal entries for bank accounts in different currencies.

*Multi-currency banking is available only to Sage Accounting Plus subscribers.

Sage Payroll highlights

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

Taking the stress out of compliance

Sage Payroll is always set up to effectively process year end but will also have your back on any mid-year changes, such as new public holidays, and one-off recognition payments for certain sectors.

New reports to help you keep on top of things

You can use salary information from a pay run to create a Salary Journal report.

If you use an accounting product, you can import the report as a journal transaction. This can save you time and reduce processing errors.

If you’re using Sage Accounting specifically, you can set up automated journals – saving even more time.

The Absences report shows you any employee time off that you’ve recorded as an absence.

The report can be run for any of your employees and can show data for any time period since you started using Sage Payroll.

Engage your people with payslip messages

You can now add customised messages to your employee payslips to help communicate important information about their pay. This is useful for lots of different reasons such as:

• Explaining a pay rise
• Telling people about new legislation that affects their pay
• Wishing everyone a happy Christmas.

You can also edit payslip messages for multiple employees at the same time. This makes it easier to manage messages that apply to lots of people.

What to look forward to

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 – and we look forward to sharing more soon.

Smarter reporting capabilities for Sage Accounting

Get better visibility and access the level of detail you need by personalising your financial reports to suit the demands of your business.

With Sage Accounting Standard and Plus products, soon you’ll be able to customise your reports to gain further insights on how your business is performing.

You’ll use analysis types to filter information and access in-depth detail by project, department or cost centre across the four key financial reports:

• Profit and loss
• Balance sheet
• Trial balance
• Nominal activity summary.

To save you time, you’ll also be able to save your customised report views for easier access.

In all Sage Accounting products, you’ll be able to access three new pre-configured views per report, across the aforementioned four essential financial reports.

The pre-configured comparison and period views make it easier for you to keep up with the performance of your business.

All reports are also fully accessible and responsive.

To view and manipulate data, you’ll be able to add comparison and variance, export reports to Excel, CSV or PDF formats, and more.

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.

Enhanced features and compliance for Sage Payroll

With Sage Payroll, you can be confident that you’re always up to date with the latest legislative changes.

And it looks to be another busy year for Ireland with the introduction of the statutory sick pay (SSP) scheme, plus auto-enrolment is on the horizon too.

We value your feedback and one of the areas you have asked us to look at is the ability to analyse staff costs by department for example.

To facilitate this, we’re looking at adding analysis types to employee records so you can set these up as departments or other analysis types and report on these.

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