Payroll and HR solutions provider Zellis has announced plans to acquire elementsuite in a move the firm said will expand the capabilities of its HR software offering.

The transaction, for which financial terms were not disclosed, will see elementsuite combined with Zellis’ own payroll and HR software to create an end-to-end, AI-powered platform.

Headquartered in Watford, elementsuite provides an AI-powered HR and workforce management (WFM) software suite designed to manage the full employee lifecycle.

Prominent fast food giants McDonald’s and Five Guys are listed as customers.

Subject to customary closing conditions, Zellis and elementsuite will now become one company in a move Zellis said will see both sets of customers gain access to new AI-powered software capabilities.

“We’re excited by the opportunity that this combination brings for new and existing customers of both elementsuite and Zellis,” commented Zellis CEO Abigail Vaughan.

“Bringing together the depth of talent across both businesses and combining the strength of elementsuite’s HR and AI capabilities with Zellis’ payroll, HR and AI capabilities will deliver even more value to our combined customers.”

Founded in 1963, Zellis specializes in the provision of payroll, HR, and managed services to customers across the UK and Ireland with more than 500 employees.

The firm itself has grown to become the largest provider of its kind in the UK, serving more than five million customers’ employees and over 60 million payslips every year.

Zellis eyes AI gains with latest acquisition

The elementsuite acquisition is Zellis’ latest move to expand its AI capabilities and follows the release of its HCM AIR solution, which is designed to enhance functionality and the employee experience, in June of last year.

Commenting on the move, Steve Elcock, CEO and founder of elementsuite, said Zellis’ standing will enable the firm to better meet the needs of the market.

“We are incredibly proud of the AI enabled HR suite we have developed in recent years and, with the support of Zellis, are looking forward to bringing the benefits of our technology to more businesses,” he said.

“Zellis’ leadership in payroll will further enhance our overall offering and will help us better meet market demand.”

Oracle NetSuite has revealed SuitePeople Workforce Management, a new solution for optimising work shifts and improving profitability.

Through heavy use of automation, SuitePeople Workforce Management aims to improve the overall system of shift scheduling, attendance monitoring, and wage calculations for employers. It integrates shift forecasts, payroll and financial systems, alongside employee attendance to provide each company with end-to-end oversight of its workforce.

With the solution, users can automatically produce visual shift schedules, as informed by information such as forecasts and staffing needs to provide detailed plans. This includes the option to generate recommendations for users, to optimise staff scheduling according to individual business needs.

SuitePeople Workforce Management also uses a ‘wage rule engine’ to improve the process of calculating time worked, utilising integration with SuitePeople Payroll to automatically use data on approved hours to inform accurate payrolls for employee hours, overtime and holiday pay.

The new tool, announced at NetSuite's annual SuiteWorld conference, is part of a larger package of announcements all designed to make it easier to deploy automation across a company, including accounting tools to make it easier to pay bills.

In addition to generating employee rotas, the solution is integrated to track and analyse employee attendance. SuitePeople Time Clock enables shifts to be logged using a mobile app as well as through the use of photo capture and biometric fingerprint scans. This has the stated benefit of ensuring that employees are themselves clocking into work, rather than having it been done on their behalf by coworkers, and thus provides a better idea of workforce engagement and punctuality.

Through the app, employees can also swap or pick up shifts and direct message managers. It also provides a unified channel through which managers can contact employees with attendance discrepancies, focusing engagement between managers and employees and simplifying professional channels.

“With SuitePeople Workforce Management, scheduling shifts and tracking employees’ time is more efficient than ever. I make all approvals directly in NetSuite and create a payroll batch with one click,” said Urban Legacy product and platform director, Kristi Miller.

“This helps put Urban Legacy in a position to plan intelligently and change operations quickly.”

Managers are additionally able to use SuitePeople Workforce Management’s real-time dashboard to view metrics such as wages, sales and operational forecasts, and compare these to live results. With this data in hand, firms are able to make more informed, up-to-date decisions regarding workforces, and leverage greater insight into the costs of their existing employees.

With the skills gap affecting the majority of firms, and hiring skilled IT workers harder than ever, many organisations are looking inwards to address the problem through reskilling. With the right insight, chief information officers (CIOs) can address the problem, and this is an area where the oversight into metrics and profit provided by SuitePeople Workforce Management could be instrumental.

Many companies are responding to the cost of living crisis and international economic headwinds by reducing employee numbers, such as Twilio’s recent 11% workforce cut, and SuitePeople Workforce Management can also assist companies to best identify the areas within their workforces where such cuts can be made.

Workforce Management forms part of the wider NetSuite SuitePeople, the company’s HR management system that works across departments to improve efficiency in company decision-making. This is key to the centralisation of human resources and financial operations for NetSuite customers, marrying oversight with business insight.

Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite, highlighted the important role that SuitePeople Workforce Management can play in optimising access to workers in the current economy.

“In a tight labour market, organisations need to elevate the management of their workforce to be competitive,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite.

“With SuitePeople Workforce Management, organisations can quickly adjust staffing to align with changing business conditions. They can also ensure they accurately pay their employees and meet compliance requirements.

“This addition to SuitePeople reinforces our commitment to helping our customers increase employee engagement, which in turn positively impacts the bottom line.”

NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management will be available in early 2023, within the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its release in the UK and Ireland is expected in the summer of 2023.

Intuit has warned of a new phishing campaign specifically targeting the users of small business accounting software QuickBooks.

The latest phishing campaign, which is the fifth major security threat the company has issued warnings over this year, involves tricking users into thinking their account has been suspended.

In an example email received by a customer, shared by Intuit, the phishing campaign lacks some sophistication in that the sender’s web domain does not appear related to either Intuit or the QuickBooks brands.

In more recent sophisticated scams, hackers have been able to send emails to an organisation’s employees directly off the back of existing email chains to increase the level of deception and perceived authenticity.

The latest email campaign does adopt the QuickBooks branding in the email’s body and, unlike the more common phishing scams, the language used is convincing and professional in tone.

Victims are presented with a notice that their account will be suspended after the QuickBooks team were supposedly unable to verify account information.

There is a link included in the email that purports to take users to a page to complete their account verification. Intuit did not say what happened if a user clicked on the link, but the company did advise users to delete anything that was downloaded from the email.

This detail would suggest that the attack was attempting to distribute malware, which could be used for any number of purposes, including information or credential theft, ransomware, and business email compromise attacks.

“Intuit has recently received reports from customers that they have received emails similar to the one below,” the company said in an announcement. “This email did not come from Intuit. The sender is not associated with Intuit, is not an authorised agent of Intuit, nor is their use of Intuit's brands authorised by Intuit.”

QuickBooks users are advised to delete anything that has been downloaded from email immediately and run a system-wide scan using an up-to-date antivirus application. If the link was clicked, users should also consider changing their passwords, Intuit said.

Intuit phishing attacks in 2022

Intuit’s QuickBooks software is used widely by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across the world. The company’s website claims it currently has 4.5 million users worldwide.

The large user base has been a target for cyber attackers this year, especially around the US tax season when the company was forced to issue two separate security advisories in as many days back in February.

In both phishing scams, the email attempted to lure users with a fake account inactivity notice, claiming their account was disabled through a lack of use. Victims were presented with links to a fake Intuit site that could have been used to steal account credentials.

Cyber criminals have targeted these types of software around tax seasons before, both in the US this year and in the UK towards the end of 2021, as the self-assessment deadline approached.

The other two Intuit scams this year occurred in April, as customers reported fake emails relating to their software subscription. Intuit issued two separate advisories for the campaigns that appeared to be linked given the same fake email domains from which the payment receipt and payment invoices were sent.

Former Post Office workers who had been falsely convicted of fraud based on evidence from a faulty accounting system have had their names cleared, after over two decades of legal battles.

The subpostmasters had been convicted of theft and false accounting, based on information drawn from the Horizon software system, which had been in use by the Post Office since 1999.

The Fujitsu-developed system, used for accounting and stockpiling, was used as evidence to successfully prosecute 736 people between 2000 and 2014, out of which 42 maintained their innocence for over a decade.

It would later emerge that a system bug had produced financial shortfalls in branch accounts, resulting in unaccounted funds.

Many falsely convicted Post Office employees had their personal lives destroyed as a consequence of the convictions, having been sent to prison and denied insurance in many cases. Some have since passed away, unable to hear today’s verdict.

However, following years of legal battles, Lord Justice Holroyde at the Royal Courts of Justice in London said the Post Office "knew there were serious issues about the reliability of Horizon" and had a "clear duty to investigate" the system's flaws.

Those who have had their convictions overturned in today’s ruling are as follows: Josephine Hamilton, Hughie Thomas, Allison Henderson, Alison Hall, Gail Ward, Julian Wilson, Jacqueline McDonald, Tracy Felstead, Janet Skinner, Scott Darlington, Seema Misra, Della Robinson, Khayyam Ishaq, David Thomas Hedges, Peter Anthony Holmes, Rubina Shaheen, Damien Owen, Mohammed Rasul, Wendy Buffrey, Kashmir Gill, Barry Capon, Vijay Parekh, Lynette Hutchings, Dawn O'Connell, Carl Page, Lisa Brennan, William Graham, Siobhan Sayer, Pauline Thomson, Tim Burgess, Nicholas Clark, Margery Williams, Tahir Mahmood, Ian Warren, David Yates, Harjinder Butoy, Gillian Howard, David Blakey and Pamela Lock.

Commenting on today’s ruling, Post Office chief executive Nick Read said that he is “in no doubt about the human cost of the Post Office's past failures and the deep pain that has been caused to people affected”.

"Many of those postmasters involved have been fighting for justice for a considerable length of time and sadly there are some who are not here to see the outcome today and whose families have taken forward appeals in their memory. I am very moved by their courage. The quashing of historical convictions is a vital milestone in fully and properly addressing the past as I work to put right these wrongs as swiftly as possible and there must be compensation that reflects what has happened,” he added.

Computer Weekly originally broke the story back in 2009, and have campaigned over the past decade on behalf of the postmasters.

Deel, a payroll and compliance platform for international teams, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Spark Capital. The investment follows a $14 million Series A round that closed in May and was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deel’s total funding now tops $48 million.

There’s no denying that the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the shift to remote work. With many businesses now allowing teams to choose where they work, the opportunity to recruit and hire talent from anywhere in the world has presented itself. This is where Deel comes in.

Deel’s platform solves the payroll and compliance challenges that come with shifting to a distributed global workforce. As costly as it is time-consuming, specific currency and labor law requirements vary by country, making onboarding and paying international workers very complex.

The platform provides legally vetted and compliant templates companies can use for taxes and localized contracts. It also offers automated payment, invoicing and receipts, and customer support. Deel’s technology supports independent contractors and full-time employees.

Deel currently supports over 500 companies in more than 140 countries.

“We’ve squashed the conventional notion that there’s a particular radius in which you can attract talent,” said Deel co-founder and CEO, Alex Bouaziz.

“By bridging localized compliance and payments and then automating it, we are making a complex and manual process seamless and redefining U.S. companies’ hiring pool to literally include qualified candidates from anywhere,” Bouaziz added.

Deel has experienced rapid growth throughout the pandemic too. Not only has its customer base doubled, but the company has also seen a significant uptick in individual full-time employees and independent contractors on the platform since May.

Julie Bissinger, head of operations for Near, Inc., says Near has used Deel’s platform to fill 15 marketing and engineering roles with employees in seven countries.

Bissinger added, “Deel saves us hours of time every month and ensures we’re compliant in our team members’ local regions.”

FreshBooks is a Canadian cloud accounting suite that dedicates itself to serving freelancers, sole traders, microbusinesses and growing small businesses. It's designed to be easy to use, without the clutter of features that are only needed by larger enterprises.

Instead, it focuses on capabilities commonly used by small businesses, from standard invoicing and expenses to time tracking and project management. There are three set subscription tiers, plus a top-end custom priced tier for businesses with more than 500 clients.

Priced at $15 USD per month - 11.47 - the Lite tier gives you five billable clients, unlimited invoices and expenses, time tracking, reports and estimates, among other features. Be aware though, that it lacks user-accessible double-entry accounting reports.

For those, you'll need the $25 (19.11) per month Plus tier, which also includes detailed customer proposal templates, recurring invoices and late fee handling. It supports up to 50 billable clients and is the best tier for most freelance service providers.

If your customer base grows beyond that, the Premium tier supports up to 500 clients and costs $50 (38.22) per month. Extra team members can be added to any account for $10 (7.64) per person and all tiers allow you to give your accountant access to your books free of charge.

Unfortunately, none of the tiers include support for submitting UK self-assessment tax returns or PAYE for your employees.

FreshBooks review: Getting started

Whatever tier you subscribe to, you'll be given the option of using FreshBooks or legacy FreshBooks Classic. While the latter is more comfortable for long-time users, its focus is primarily on invoicing and it lacks features such as a proper double-entry ledger and accessible Chart Of Accounts. Our review looks exclusively at the current edition of the service.

During a short guided setup process, you're prompted to add your company's details, customise the appearance of your invoices and test the service's email-based invoicing system. Invoices are made available online to clients, who can print them to paper or PDF or - if you've added a payment provider - pay directly online.

With that done, you're left with your dashboard page, capable of providing an overview of revenue, spending, profit and time. But you'll need to create some invoices before it has anything to show you.

FreshBooks review: Clients, invoicing, estimates and expenses

It's generally very obvious where to find everything in FreshBooks, but we'd have nonetheless appreciated more of a guided setup process, particularly for users with existing data to import. You can bulk import clients from contact data files in CSV format. Address handling is a little odd, in that only a single street address line is shown in your client records. However, pasted carriage returns within addresses are recognised and accurately reproduced on invoices.

You can also add clients directly from the invoice creation interface, where you can also customise invoice numbers - future invoices automatically increment on any numbering pattern. You can also invoice in foreign currencies, create recurring invoices, specify taxes, request deposits and add discounts.

Clicking into the due date field allows you to set the invoice as due on receipt or on net 30, net 15 or custom terms. These will be inherited by any future invoices you create.

As well as sending them via email or shareable link, invoices can be printed, downloaded and marked as sent, for customers who prefer to receive physical paperwork. You can also mark them as paid when you receive payment.

FreshBooks automatically keeps track of your balances in any currency you start working in, in addition to the base currency defined in your company profile. You can also choose which currency to see in the summary graphs on your Dashboard screen.

When you select the Invoices pane, an Other Income tab will become visible below its navigation bar entry on the right. This allows you to enter income in a number of different categories above and beyond direct invoicing. Note that you must provide customers with invoices and bills in compliance with the legal status of your company, even for cash transactions, and you must retain relevant documentation relating to cash sales, royalties, advertising income and online sales carried out on your behalf by third parties.

As well as invoices, FreshBooks can create estimates and - at its higher subscription tiers - detailed proposals describing the exact nature of the services or project plan you're offering to a client. Once created, these can easily be converted into invoices if your client accepts the estimates, and proposals have digital signature support, to create a permanent record showing that your client has approved the suggested plan.

Expenses can be added one-by-one, or in bulk via a CSV template. You can add an image of a receipt to go with each expense entry, although we'd have liked PDF support here, as well. Once again, you can work in any currency you like and mark it expenses as recurring - helpful for subscriptions and instalment purchases.

You can also tag the expense as Cost of Goods Sold to for more accurate profit and loss tracking, or directly assign it to a client - with or without a markup - if it's something you've purchased to sell directly or include in the costs of a larger project.

FreshBooks review: Banking and accounting

Expenses can also be added from imported bank statements and linked bank accounts. Direct bank account linking is a relatively new feature for FreshBooks, as is bank account reconciliation in general.

To access the bank connection beta, go to the Accounting pane and click the Connect My Bank button. All the major UK high street banks are supported, alongside many foreign banks and some digital-only services, such as Revolut, although as with most accounting software, Starling, Monzo, TransferWise and Shine are all conspicuous by their absence.

Unfortunately, if your bank isn't supported, then there's no way to manually add it or upload statements. FreshBooks plans to implement this in the future but doesn't currently have a concrete date for the feature's introduction.

The reconciliation tool - available to Plus and Premium customers - will attempt to automatically match bank activity to your invoices and expenses, and appropriately classify other transactions by category. There were a few misses when it came to automatic transaction identification, but it's easy to reclassify items and create new COA categories on the fly.

The Accounting section also gives you access to your Chart Of Accounts, balance sheet, profit and loss reports and other tools to help you ensure the accuracy of your accounts. The Reports tab provides further helpful summaries of invoices, expenses and more.

FreshBooks review: Projects, time and tax

Project management and time tracking tools are built into FreshBooks. When you create a project, you're prompted to select whether it's to be billed at a flat rate or by the hour.

You can categorise different tasks that will be involved in your projects, or create new ones when you enter work time. Time can be logged for either kind of project, allowing you to see how many working hours go into flat rate projects to help assess their efficiency and profitability. You can also generate invoices directly from the time tracking page for projects that are billed hourly.

FreshBooks is compliant with HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme, via a bridging application created by 1 Click Accounts. Although the UK VAT return option is a little buried in the Reports section of the web interface, the bridging tool is neatly embedded into FreshBooks, with consistent branding and a clear guide to using it. As well as your FreshBooks and HMRC logins, you'll also need to create an account for the bridging tool. Once set up and linked, however, the process is a matter of just a few clicks.

FreshBooks has no payroll support, which in turn means no support for PAYE, pensions or other employee benefits. Gusto, the only payroll suite currently supported as a FreshBooks integration, is only available for US customers, while another supported external option, Payroll Evolution, is restricted to Canada. You can simply create appropriate COA classifications for staff wages and contributions, but you'll have to manage them using entirely separate software.

FreshBooks review: Mobile apps & integrations

A wide range of integrations are available, from e-commerce platforms such as Shopify to CRM including SalesForce and Capsule, integrations with G-Suite for contact syncing, and payment services like Stripe.

FreshBooks apps are available for Android and iOS, providing a streamlined mobile experience for invoicing, quote generation and expense tracking on the move. You can also get an overview of your account, track time and create full proposals using the app. A separate app is available for legacy FreshBooks Classic users.

FreshBooks review: Verdict

FreshBooks provides a genuinely easy-to-use accounting experience for small businesses, and is particularly well designed for businesses and individuals who provide services.

FreshBooks support HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme, but UK businesses with employees will have to look elsewhere for payroll and PAYE, as payroll integrations are only available for the US and Canada. Additionally, if you use a bank that isn't supported by the service's linking tool, there's also no way of manually adding it or uploading statements.

If you have only a handful of clients, FreshBooks' Lite tier is competitively priced. However, it's ultimately less flexible and less suitable for freelancers and growing small businesses than key rival FreeAgent.

Verdict

FreshBooks packs in plenty of features, but although it supports Making Tax Digital, it lacks support for other UK tax filings and its cheapest tier places harsh restrictions on client numbers.

One of the few cloud-based accounting suites based in the UK, with data centres located in England, FreeAgent focuses on providing services to small limited companies, partnerships and sole traders. It's fully equipped to handle both HMRC's new Making Tax Digital platform for VAT payments, as well as PAYE, pension auto-enrolment and national insurance payments.

Charities can select the Universal version of FreeAgent, but those with paid staff should note that this doesn't include an HMRC-compliant payroll feature or UK VAT filing.

FreeAgent offers a variety of different pricing tiers. For most of the world, it only shows a single tier, priced at $20 (15.29) per month and covering any company structure you select. For UK users, however, pricing is more granular, a little more expensive, and includes specialist tools and tax filing features appropriate to your company structure.

Sole traders pay 19 per month (exc VAT) and get self-assessment features. Partnerships are charged 24 per month (exc VAT) and get profit share calculation features but partners currently have no self-assessment capabilities. Limited companies are charged 29 per month (exc VAT) and get access to self-assessment filing for directors, dividend vouchers and corporation tax forecasting.

New users get six months at half price and discounts are available if you pay annually, rather than on a rolling monthly subscription.

All tiers include Making Tax Digital-compliant VAT filing, multi-currency invoicing and unlimited users, clients and projects, and all FreeAgent users also get a gigabyte of file storage - with a maximum file size of 5MB - to help keep track of important documents and records.

FreeAgent review: Setup and configuration

After signing up, you're prompted to confirm your business type. It's important to get this right as it can't be changed later, and key features offered and calculations made by FreeAgent depend on this selection. The options for UK businesses are Sole Trader, Partnership, Limited Liability Company and Limited Company. Sole Traders and Partnerships can draw dividends, Limited Companies and LLCs get payroll and pension features, and all of them can file VAT if appropriately registered.

As well as a start date and tax year date for your business, you're prompted to include details of the bank account you use for your business from the very beginning. All you have to do here is give the account a name, enter the bank's name, your account number and sort code and your opening balance as of your FreeAgent start date. Later, you'll be able to set up direct feeds for supported banks.

With that done, you're presented with a checklist to help you customise and get familiar with FreeAgent. The guide takes you through customising and sending invoices, recording expenses, linking bank accounts so that transaction data is automatically imported, and using FreeAgent's projects feature. Items are ticked off as you work through the list.

FreeAgent review: Clients and Invoicing

If, as suggested, you jump straight into creating your first invoice, you'll be prompted to enter the name of your client and an invoice reference number, which by default will become the starting point for a sequential numbering system used by all invoices, although you can also have individual number sequences for specific clients and projects.

You'll specify the date, payment terms in days, currency and any additional text you wish to add to the bottom of the invoice. You can also set a default text to appear on all invoices. Further options allow you to add discounts, select the applicable VAT region, customise payment terms and contact information for specific invoices and customers, display project names, company logos and banking details as required.

Invoices can be emailed out, but you'll first have to confirm your email address and create a template email. FreeAgent has a surprisingly powerful set of macro commands that you can use to insert invoice data into your email. The same template creation tool can be used to email estimates to clients, as well as automatic reminders for imminent, due or overdue invoices and thank you notes when they're marked as paid.

With that done, you're taken to the invoice itself where you can itemise what you're charging for as products, services, blocks of time, projects and more. From here, links allow you to further customise your invoice and contact information, change the invoice's theme, save the invoice as a PDF for printing, send it by email, or use it to create a recurring invoice to make it easy to bill for subscriptions and rolling contracts. You can also configure online payment handling via PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless.

The only thing you'll need to create a contact is a name for the client and an email address if you plan on invoicing them electronically. However, it's a good idea to populate your contact book with as much data as you need for your clients and suppliers on a day-to-day basis.

FreeAgent's Contacts screen allows you to manually add full details and per-contact invoicing preferences or import contacts from a wide range of other sources, including Gmail or G-Suite, Outlook, your Apple contacts book and rival accounting service FreshBooks.

Invoices and estimates, alongside other key billing and tracking tools, can be found beneath the Work tab at the top of FreeAgent's reassuringly consistent interface, and are among the data summarised on the main overview screen.

FreeAgent review: Bills, expenses and payroll

FreeAgent provides businesses of all sizes with tools for logging expenses, bills and other payments. How that appears will depend on the kind of businesses you've set up.

Sole traders just have a single Expenses tab, where they can register payments made on a personal card on behalf of the business or log road vehicle mileage to reclaim VAT on fuel costs. You can attach receipt images, add descriptions, make the expense recurring and link it to a project.

Larger firms instead get a tab labelled My Money, with pull-down options for Expenses, Dividends, Salary and Payroll. A lot of careful design has been invested to help people who run small limited companies keep clear boundaries between the business's money and their own.

The Bills tab appears for all kinds of businesses, and covers anything that you get an invoice for but don't have to pay immediately, allowing you to keep track of exactly when you'll have to pay them. For items that are paid immediately or via recurring direct debit, FreeAgent instead recommends simply assigning outgoings to appropriate categories as they appear in your bank statements.

FreeAgent review: Banks and accounting

FreeAgent can link to your bank accounts to automatically import your transaction history. The usual range of UK high street and business banks is supported via Yodlee, as are major international banks.

Once connected, all transactions will be imported so you can easily reconcile them against invoices and assign outgoings to appropriate categories on your chart of accounts.

However, almost none of the most recent online-only challenger banks are represented. Although there's a dedicated integration to add support for Revolut accounts, we had no luck searching for Shine, Monzo or TransferWise. Fortunately for businesses that use such banks, or those who'd rather not use online linking tools, you can click past the initial "link your account" screen shown in the Banking tab and simply upload bank statements.

Statement uploads in OFX, QBO and QIF formats are fully supported, as are a few banks' CSV files. For others, you'll have to manually reformat the files, removing all column header rows and all columns apart from date, transaction and description. While we'd have liked to see integrated column selection, it's still a big step up from accounting suites that only support direct bank linking.

You can create as many accounts as you need, in whatever currencies you use, with separate account types for standard bank accounts, PayPal accounts and credit cards.

FreeAgent can also be instructed to try to automatically assign transactions to the most relevant category in your Chart of Accounts if you enable the "guess bank transactions" feature, which learns and improves its accuracy based on transactions you manually categorise.

Account reconciliation is a smooth process with pull-down menu options and COA categories for most transaction types you're likely to encounter, from sales and refunds to inter-account transfers. Some, however, you'll have to first create a COA category for - we had to do this when entering income from royalty payments.

You can add new categories, via the Accounting, Tax & VAT section of FreeAgent's settings, and can view the status of all active COA categories, along with numerous other reports, under the Accounting tab in FreeAgent's main navigation bar.

Because it's designed to suit any business, FreeAgent is absolutely jam-packed with features. There's basic stock control that lets you keep track of sales, purchases and quantities of items for sales-based companies and project management with time tracking that allows you to bill at pre-agreed hourly rates, with optional time and currency budgets.

FreeAgent review: Tax and payroll

The tax and payroll options available to you with FreeAgent depend entirely on the kind of business you run. Everyone who's VAT-registered gets access to UK VAT filing via HMRC's new Making Tax Digital portal - after you've connected FreeAgent to your MTD portal account and set up your VAT return periods, you can submit your filings with just a couple of clicks. An on-screen guide helps you through the initial connection process.

If you make relevant digital sales to European customers, you can also tag items that fall under the EU's VAT MOSS scheme to make it easier to tot up figures for European VAT filings.

Sole traders and company directors get an excellent self-assessment interface for their tax returns and larger businesses get an integrated payroll module that, once configured, automatically submits to HMRC, with support for student loans, parental leave and employment allowance. FreeAgent also supports the Construction Industry Scheme for subcontractors.

FreeAgent review: Apps and integrations

A range of integrations for third-party services are available, split between the settings page and a dedicated add-ons shop. There's support for a range of online payment systems, project management tools like Basecamp, plus CRMs such as Capsule and receipt processing services including Receipt Bank and Rydoo.

The obligatory mobile app has support for the invoicing, time tracking, client logging and expense tracking on the move. It also gives you a wide range of account management and reporting features, including an overview of your tax filings and bank transaction reconciliation.

FreeAgent review: Verdict

We love the clarity of FreeAgent's UK tier structure. While many rival's cheaper tiers restrict the number of invoices or active clients you can have, or can't combine MTD with self-assessment, FreeAgent gives you everything your businesses can legally take advantage of, with no other restrictions.

It's a little more expensive than rivals such as FreshBooks and QuickBooks but for VAT-registered small businesses, the features FreeAgent provides mean that you'll never outgrow your accounting software and you won't have to pay for extra bolt-ons.

Its interface and documentation are also excellent and we were very pleased to find that FreeAgent, almost uniquely, uses UK data centres. For UK businesses, that all adds up to a package that wins over bigger names like Sage and Xero.

Verdict

With full support for digital tax filing with HMRC and feature tiers that are based solely on the legal requirements for British businesses, FreeAgent isn't the cheapest service around - but it's an ideal accounting tool for UK-based small businesses.

New Zealand-based cloud accounting specialist Xero is geared up to support HMRC's new Making Tax Digital VAT payment scheme - which becomes mandatory for all UK businesses with turnover above the 85,000 VAT registration threshold from the 1 April 2019.

Xero is among the more expensive SaaS accounting suites around, with three tiers targeting businesses of various sizes. Xero Starter costs 10 per month as standard but severely limits the number of transactions you can process every month: you can send just 5 invoices, enter 5 bills and reconcile 20 bank transactions. This means that it's only suitable for the very smallest of businesses.

Priced at 22 per month, Xero Standard removes those limits, while for 27.50 per month, Xero Premium adds multicurrency support for SMEs that do business overseas. New subscriber discounts are frequently available for all tiers.

Unlike some of Xero's rivals, all three tiers support online VAT submission to HMRC. Bolt-on features are also available at levels, including Payroll at 1 per employee per month, Projects at 5 per user per month and Expenses at 2.50 a month for each user. You can invite your accountant to access your books, and any bolt on service that you want to add, free of charge.

Xero review: Getting started

When you sign up to Xero, you're prompted to add a few details about your company and then taken to the main dashboard, where a guided setup wizard awaits you.

You're asked a few simple questions to configure your financial year, whether you want to stick with Xero's default chart of accounts categories or import your own from a previous accounting suite, and are invited to connect your bank to directly import transactions.

The Add Bank Accounts screen - also available via the Bank accounts screen in Xero's Accounting menu - allows you to connect accounts from a large number of financial institutions that do business in the UK, including PayPal and both business and personal services from the usual high street banks.

However, although a number of online-only banks such as Revolut, TransferWise and HSBC's well-established First Direct are represented, some of the current wave of digital challenger banks don't appear. ING, Monzo, and Shine are among those currently missing, as are foreign banks.

If your account uses two-factor authentication, you'll have to generate a login code every time you sync its transactions with Xero. Otherwise, they'll be synced automatically every day. If your bank doesn't come up when you search Xero's list, you can just select "Add it anyway", enter your sort code and account number, and manually upload your statements in CSV format.

If you have a foreign bank account, you'll have to extract the account number and sort code from its IBAN to set it up, after which you can just upload statements as for any other non-connected account.

With your accounts added, you're next prompted to enter your balances as they were on the date that you want Xero to work from - the beginning of the current month by default. For foreign currency accounts, you'll have to - slightly obtusely - double-click on the balance field and then add both the balance and confirm the exchange rate you wish to use.

Once you've imported some bank transactions, Xero's tutorial wizard sends you to reconcile them: match them up to your expenses and invoice payments. Unlike some rivals, such as QuickBooks, Xero doesn't try to automatically classify transactions based on their description or the company involved, which means that your first reconciliation could be quite time-consuming.

Xero review: Invoicing

The next stop on the guided set-up process is particularly useful: adding unpaid invoices and bills to pay. This is an important step when moving your business to any new accounting suite, but it's nice to have it made explicit. To complete the invoices, you'll also need to enter your organisation's contact details as prompted.

You can either enter all your outstanding invoices manually or download a CSV template to help you upload them en mass. To help balance your books, you should also add any invoices that have been paid within the period covered by the bank transactions you imported earlier.

Note that, when using the template, you have to enter a unit number and amount for each invoice rather than simply entering the total in order for the import to complete. While you can conveniently opt to save imported client details when doing a bulk invoice import, if you're going to create your initial invoices manually, you should set up your Contacts and invoice template - in your Organisation settings - before.

Helpfully, Xero also provides a free portal that your customers can use to view and even pay their invoices immediately via PayPal.

Xero review: Staff, payroll and tax

If you have employees, you'll be prompted to add them and set up your payroll accounts towards the end of the guided account configuration process - Xero Payroll costs 1 per employee with a minimum fee of 5 per month.

Once you've entered each staff member's basic data - name, date of birth, address and binary gender - you're prompted to fill out a standard range of information, from employee number, start date, NI number and national holiday group before you can go about setting up their tax and pension data.

Xero can help you calculate and submit PAYE tax, national insurance contributions and pension filings in the process of managing and paying your staff. There's a full range of human resources options here, including a request system for time off, complete with support for statutory shared parental leave.

When it comes to VAT, Xero will automatically put together your return based on your month's transactions and, at the click of a button, file it with HMRC.

Xero review: Time, inventory and expenses

Once you've created a payroll calendar for your employees, they can submit timesheets that can be used to calculate pay and integrated into optional project management systems. Xero also supports inventory tracking; you can monitor stock levels of items you buy and sell automatically as you enter bills for your purchases and invoice customers for your sales.

There's a full expenses system - a bolt-on feature charged at 2.50 per user per month - which allows your staff to easily submit claims. You can set it up to use Xero's receipt analysis, where staff take photos of receipts for their expenses and these are sent back to Xero for automatic analysis. Alternatively, if you'd rather not have the processing done on Xero's end, you and your staff can enter the information manually.

As with most online services, there's an app marketplace, featuring a range of free and paid-for tools to help you connect to third party services, including payment providers, CRM, timesheet and project management tools. You can also connect other Xero services, notably Projects and WorkFlowMax for project management.

Xero review: Interface

While Xero's main dashboard and menus are clear, as are some of its overview pages such as the Payroll interface, many of its configuration pages look a little outdated due to tiny fonts and text entry areas. They're not particularly comfortable to work with on a standard 1080p monitor, let alone higher-resolution displays.

Elsewhere, we found visible raw HTML code visible in an inventory tracking sheet. Another problem is the service's use of Flash - long depreciated and disabled by default in most browsers - to produce graphs and charts for its sales summary reports.

By comparison, the Xero mobile app looks great and is really easy to use. It doesn't give you access all the features of the web app, but provides you with key tools to monitor your business's financial health, add contacts, record bills and receipts and create quotes and invoices on the move.

Xero also runs free webinar tutorial sessions that you can sign up for, covering everything from linking your bank accounts to HMRC's new Making Tax Digital scheme and how it works with the software.

Xero review: Verdict

Xero is a solid and reliable accounting tool - if not always a particularly attractive one, largely due to inconsistent formatting that sometimes looks a little poor on modern displays. We liked the attention to detail in the guided setup process, as well as the integrated inventory system, although Payroll is a bolt-on extra.

Xero among the more expensive accounting tools you could subscribe to: it costs more than Sage and includes fewer quality-of-life flourishes than comparably-priced rival Quickbooks. The Starter plan is particularly limited by an improbably low allowance of monthly invoices.

Xero's good at what it does, and is particularly well tailored to sales-oriented businesses that need basic stock management built in, but it's not our favourite cloud-based accounting solution.

Verdict

Xero is very capable, with a wide range of features and excellent support. However, its top subscription tier is among the more expensive you'll find and its interface feels a little old-fashioned due to small font sizes and the use of Flash for some graphs.

Indian Software-as-a-Service giant Zoho is among the cloud-based accounting software firms working with HMRC to ensure that VAT registered companies are all set to use the new Making Tax Digital reporting process from the beginning of April 2019.

Zoho has European data centres in Dublin and the Netherlands, as well as the US, so doesn't have to rely on the sometimes controversial EU-US Privacy Shield data protection framework. Zoho's European data centres are covered by the UK's decision to regard all EEA member states as meeting adequate data protection requirements, even in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

Priced in dollars, no matter where you are in the world, Zoho Books is a very competitive option across its subscription tiers. There are three, scaled to fit micro, small and medium businesses respectively.

Priced at $9 (6.83), Zoho Books Basic supports one user, with an extra account for inviting your accountant, with up to 50 contacts and five automated workflows. Workflows allow you to automate some features, for example sending email instructions to the relevant shipping and packing department when a sale is made, automatically applying discounts to large orders, or webhooks to send text messages to clients or suppliers when bills are paid.

It has a standard but useful set of core features: bank reconciliation, custom invoices, expense tracking, projects and timesheets which are rare to find in entry-level accounting suites - plus recurring transactions and sale approval so staff sales can be double-checked if needed.

For $19 (14.42), you get Zoho Books Standard, with support for 500 contacts, two users plus your accountant, and 10 automated workflows or modules. Extra features include the ability to log bills, issue vendor credits, use reporting tags, require purchase approval and receive SMS notifications.

The top Professional tier, which costs $29 (22.02), has unlimited contacts,10 user seats, purchase and sales orders, an inventory for basic stock control and support for a custom domain name.

Unusually, all three support multiple currencies. You can also connect a variety of other Zoho cloud-based business tools for project management, analytics, CRM and more.

Zoho Books review: Setup and configuration

Once you've signed up for Zoho Books, you're prompted to give your client portal a unique name, set your opening balances, edit the default Chart of Accounts or import your own, configure direct feed links to your bank accounts and invite staff and your accountant to access your books. This simple to-do list is clearly described and helps you transition your accounts into Zoho with a minimum of fuss.

Zoho has a particularly detailed set of fields for opening balances, which allow you to track specific expenses, assets, liabilities and equity, as well as the overall status of your accounts receivable and payable.

If you have a lot of invoices due when you set your starting balances, Zoho warns you that your total debits and credits don't balance this isn't actually a problem for the software, although the exclamation-mark emblazoned alert pop-up makes it look like one. It is important to make sure that your opening balances are correct, though, and Zoho helpfully takes you through a confirmation screen to ensure this, while providing information on how to correct any errors in future.

Similarly, we appreciated being prompted to check over Zoho's default Chart of Accounts. It's simple by design, with just a few standard categories common to every business, but it's easy to add more for example, you may wish to create separate entries for the sale of goods and sale of services.

The final suggestions direct you to set up a bank feed and give others access to your accounts if they need it, and there's where the Getting Started section leaves you to it. Users new to cloud-based accounting software would probably welcome a bit more hand-holding when it comes to configuring features like invoices, bills and time tracking for projects.

Zoho Books review: Banking

Like most cloud-based accounting suites, Zoho Books can link directly to your online banking service to import transactions. This worked smoothly, although to complete some bank connection we had to search for our bank, sign in, and then search again to be taken to a screen that allowed us to choose which of our accounts we wished to connect.

A wide range of British high street, business and international banks are supported, as well as PayPal. However, support for recent digital challenger banks is very thin on the ground, with no sign of TransferWise, Shine, ING or Revolut, among others.

Fortunately, it's very easy to add banks and upload statements manually, whether that's because your bank isn't featured or because you simply prefer not to give your accounting suite read access to your bank accounts.

Just select Add bank or credit card from the Banking screen, then hit the big blue Enter your account manually' button. You'll be prompted to give the account a name, select its currency and details such as account number or IBAN. You're then prompted to upload a statement in CSV, TSV, OFX, QIF or CAMT.053 format.

With that done, you can reconcile your transactions, assigning them to clients, suppliers and expenses and matching them against bills and invoices once you've created them. Small and micro business owners, in particular, will appreciate clearly defined categories for drawings, which not all accounting suits make so visible.

Zoho Books review: Invoicing, customers and bills

Although it's not highlighted in the getting started guide to the extent that we'd expect, it's hard to fault Zoho's invoicing workflow. When you create an invoice for the first time, you're asked to configure how you handle discounts. When you set an invoice number, a pop-up immediately asks you how you'd like to handle future invoice numbering for example by continuing from a specific number.

And when you enter a customer name, a window pops up so you can add them as a contact, including details on the currency and payment terms for the specific customer. There are fields for their social media details, and you can even enable an online portal that customers can use to access and pay their invoices. A wide range of online payment providers, including PayPal, Stripe and Worldpay, are supported.

You can save invoices as drafts, although they'll have to have at least one named item in them before you can do so. Quick invoice creation, along with fast add options for customers, vendors, bills, expenses, inventory, owner drawings and more, is instantly available via a small blue plus button at the top of the screen.

Bills and expenses work in much the same way, complete with support for attached images of receipts, and there are sample CSV and XLS forms to help you bulk upload invoice and bill data, which is helpful if you're moving across from another accounting suite.

Zoho Books review: VAT returns and other tax support

Zoho Books fully supports HMRC's electronic Making Tax Digital system, and also provides tools for tracking VAT MOSS for European sales.

For MTD, you're taken through the process of connecting your HMRC account, after which a VAT Filing module will be available in the main left-hand navigation bar. From there, you'll be able to generate VAT returns at the click of a button, check them over, make any necessary adjustments and submit them to HMRC.

Unfortunately, payroll support and all related tax and deduction handling is conspicuous by its absence. Zoho Payroll isn't currently available outside the US and while the company is looking into integration with third-party payroll services, it can't specify when this feature will be available. For now, you'll have to use another service to handle payslips, PAYE and pensions and simply log those outgoings in Zoho Books.

Zoho Books review: Inventory, time tracking and integrations

Zoho Books is packed with features and also integrates with other Zoho cloud-based business tools, such as Expense, Subscriptions, Inventory and Checkout and CRM, plus document autoscanning that can automatically transcribe 50 items of paperwork a month. However, these cost extra.

But plenty more is built into the standard subscription and ready to go. For Professional subscribers, the Zoho Books Items tool can handle complex, illustrated price lists and inventory tracking, providing simple and effective stock management for sales-oriented businesses. Using its Time Tracking tools, available at all tiers, you can bill by staff, project or task hours and add multiple Zoho Books users to projects in order to track their time.

This is made easy by the Zoho Books mobile apps which, as well as real-time and post-dated time logging for users, provide handy shortcuts for adding expenses, invoices and contacts on the move, and a near-complete replica of the desktop browser features, from banking and reconciliation to reports, with the exception of VAT filing.

Zoho Books review: Interface

Zoho Books looks nice, is easy to read and presents all its information clearly, but it lacks the generous guidance and help of many other online accounting suites. We found that it took a little longer to learn our way around than in rival products from Xero, Sage and Quickbooks.

Its sidebar behaviour is also sometimes inconsistent. Click on Dashboard, Contacts, Banking or Reports, and a new screen opens with options or data to view. However, the Items, Sales, Purchases, Time Tracking and Accountant tabs all open up further sub-menus rather than an overview screen.

Fortunately, once you've learned the ropes, everything becomes second nature, even though we'd have appreciated an integrated help interface rather than being redirected to a separate support portal to search for answers.

Zoho Books review: Verdict

Zoho Books provides an excellent set of tools for managing your business's incomings, outgoings and VAT. Its top tier is great for sales-oriented businesses that need inventory tracking. Small businesses with international clients will be pleased to note that multicurrency support, time tracking and integrated VAT returns are supported at all tiers. The only major downside is that it doesn't have any kind of payroll facility.

However, a wealth of features at even lower subscription tiers, along with the current strength of the pound relative to Zoho's US dollar pricing, makes this a very worthwhile choice for a small business on a budget, particularly if you already use an external payroll service.

Verdict

Although it can't handle your payroll, Zoho Books is very capable at all price tiers and has an outstanding mobile app, making it a cost-effective choice for small businesses with worldwide customers. It's not easy to use as QuickBooks, but if you don't mind handling your payroll elsewhere, it's a great budget buy.

Sage is among the accounting software providers that's been working with HMRC to ensure that it's all set up for the introduction of the government's new Making Tax Digital at the beginning of April.

While most of Sage's rivals in the world of cloud-based SMB accounting suites have three or more tiers for businesses of different sizes and requirements, Sage keeps it simple with just two core subscription options, both of which allow you give your accountant full access free of charge.

Priced at 10 per month, Sage Accounting Start is designed to handle invoicing, track payments and file VAT returns. It's a bit of a jump to the full 22 Sage Accounting suite, but for that extra money you get the ability to create quotes and estimates for your customers, record purchase invoices to make it easier to monitor your outgoings and reclaim VAT, and keep on top of your books with a cashflow statement to show what money you have incoming and outgoing.

It's worth noting that many of these features come as standard in all tiers of some rival accounting suites, such as QuickBooks and Xero, although these have other limitations on their entry-level tiers. In this review, we'll focus on the full Sage Accounting suite, rather than its cut-down sibling for microbusinesses.

This also includes support for multiple currencies, more than one company, remittance notes and statement overviews for customers. If you need payroll features, including support for pensions and PAYE tax filing, you'll have to subscribe to Sage Payroll, starting at 6 a month for companies that pay up to 5 employees. A variety of introductory offers and Accounting/Payroll bundles are available.

It's also worth noting that Sage hosts all UK and European users' data at Amazon's Dublin datacentre in Ireland. This is covered by the UK's decision to regard all EEA member states as meeting adequate data protection requirements, even in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

Sage Accounting review: Setup and configuration

When you sign up, Sage asks you for some basic information about your business, including your contact details, VAT registration status, and whether you're a sole trader, a partnership, or a limited company.

When you've finished creating your account, you're presented with not just a guided setup wizard, but a whole Getting Started tab, with multiple categories that take you through setting up customers and suppliers, connecting bank accounts and customising the default Chart of Accounts, as well as a number of optional features that depend on your business's specific needs.

Sage's first guided setup suggestion is that you create or import some customer profiles - a CSV template is supplied to help you bulk add existing clients. The customer creation tool helpfully allows you to assign a default sales category on your chart of accounts to each customer. We'd have liked more than two address lines available for UK-based clients, though.

The Customers section of Sage also provides an overview of how much each of your clients owes you, and a statement run button to generate payment reminders summarising all invoices currently due from each customer. Rather than importing full details of every existing invoice when you migrate to Sage, you can set opening balances for customers who're due to pay you.

The guided setup process also advises you to create and set balances for suppliers, view Aged Creditors and Aged Debtors reports to see how much you owe and are owed, add your bank accounts and review the default Chart of Accounts.

An Optional extras section lists a few things that might be helpful to some, but not all, businesses, such as invoice customisation, enabling foreign currency support and creating a list of products or services with fixed charges. Other Summary tabs provide an at-a-glance look at your sales, purchases and cashflow, complete with illustrative graphs - whichever one you last viewed will be open by default next you visit the page.

Sage Accounting review: Banking and reconciliation

The Banking page provides an excellent overview of your finances. Bank accounts can be added manually or via Sage's searchable online banking connection tool, which supports most of the major UK high street and business banks, but few digital challenger banks - Transferwise, ING and Shine are conspicuous by their absence.

We were pleased by how easy it was to add a bank account manually using either sort code and account number or IBAN and BIC. Although you're then prompted to connect to it online, you can opt out of that and upload statements instead. If you don't feel comfortable giving your accounting suite read access to your bank accounts, Sage is definitely a good choice.

Unfortunately, bank accounts in currencies other than GBP are not supported, even though Sage has a multicurrency mode and supports foreign currency transactions using either its own exchange rate or one that you've defined yourself based on your financial service provider's rate and charges.

The banking interface also allows you to reconcile the transactions to your invoices, bills and inter-account transfers. You can create new customer and supplier references as you go, use the Match feature associate them with paperwork that you've already logged, and create rules for easier reconciliation in future.

Once you've assigned each to your satisfaction, you have to click the Create button to the right of each transaction to complete the process. If you accidentally double-import any transactions, a cross on the left lets you discard them. If you use Sage Payroll, you'll also need to manually discard staff payment transactions to avoid logging them twice.

Sage Accounting review: Inventory, tax and payroll

Sage includes basic inventory tracking via its Products & Services interface. Here you can create entries for services and items you provide, classified as either Stock, Non-stock or Service. If you want to track quantities of something, class it as Stock and Safe will automatically track how many of the item you have in stock based on your purchase receipts and sales invoices.

The software also helps you calculate and submit your VAT returns to HMRC under the new Making Tax Digital scheme. In the VAT returns section of the Reports menu, you'll be able to create and automatically calculate your returns based on your invoices filed during the present reporting period. After checking them over, submitting your return is a simple, one-click operation.

Like most accounting packages, Sage charges extra if you need payroll features. Sage Payroll is priced at 6 per month for one to five employees, with other deals to cover more staff. Once you've subscribed, you can easily switch between Accounting and Payroll via a pull-down menu at the very top of the screen.

It's simple to use and clearly documented. Payroll handles PAYE income tax, pension auto-enrolment and deductions such as student loan payments, child support and broader categories that can be used for benefits such as company season ticket loans. It supports multiple weekly and monthly paydays, and includes a relatively painless process for entering the details of existing employees if you're transferring from existing payroll software. Note that this version of Sage Payroll, aimed at smaller businesses, doesn't support timesheets.

Sage Accounting review: Payments, apps, and integrations

Sage supports Stripe for on-invoice credit card payments and can also integrate with Sage Pay. Unlike many rivals, there's no integrated support for PayPal, but if you use the service, it's easy to add PayPal to your bank feed and simply put a payment link in your invoices and emails.

As you'd expect, there's a smartphone app for Android and iOS. It looks great and makes it easy to quickly generate quotes, invoices, payments and receipts (complete with a photo), and log bank transfers on the move. You can also add and access contacts and get an at-a-glance view of the current status of your invoices, outgoings and bank accounts.

Unlike like some rival accounting suites, or indeed Sage 50cloud, Sage Accounting doesn't have a library of modules or extensions to help you connect it to other software you might use. You can link a Google account to automatic export backup copies of invoices and quotes to Google Drive, but that's about the total extent of Sage Accounting's integration with non-Sage products.

Sage Accounting review: Interface

Sage has a powerful range of features, and its menu layout and settings are generally clear. However, font sizes on some pages are small, which can be a problem on higher resolution displays.

Almost all pages display a navigation toolbar to move around the Sage interface and a plus sign at the right of the screen makes it easy to rapidly create invoices, enter receipts, create customers and more. But this vanishes in a couple of places. For example, when you finish matching your incoming bank transactions, the only buttons on offer are Import, to bring in more transactions, or Connect Bank. We had to use the Accounting link in the top bar to get back to the Summary page.

We also noticed occasionally inconsistent support for the browser's back button, which will sometimes send you back multiple pages, rather than to the last screen you were on.

Sage Accounting review: Verdict

Sage has been a dominant force in business accounting for years and, despite some minor user interface quirks, Sage Accounting is very capable. As well as guiding you through everything from invoicing and transaction reconciliation to VAT returns, it has plenty of customisation options for both service and sales-oriented businesses, including basic stock tracking.

Sage Accounting and Payroll lacks a number of features, such as timesheets and project management tools, that we'd either expect to find built-in or available to connect via other services. The lack of support for non-GBP denominated bank accounts is also disappointing.

However, it covers the bases for the majority of businesses, making it a solid choice, if less flexible than rival Quickbooks.

Verdict

Sage is a well-established name in accounting software, and most small businesses will find that Sage Accounting meets their needs. However, these SMB subscriptions, although competitively priced, lack some key features, such as support for timesheets and non-GBP denominated bank accounts.

Intuit's QuickBooks cloud-based accounting software is a well-regarded industry leader, and it's keeping up the with times by supporting HMRC's Making Tax Digital (MTD) scheme: the new portal that all UK businesses with turnover above the 85,000 VAT registration threshold will have to use from April 2019.

There are three different QuickBooks subscription tiers, which between them cover the needs of most small-to-medium businesses. At the entry level, with a standard price of just 8 per month, the Self-Employed tier includes a selection of tools especially built for contractors, such as integration with HRMC's tax self-assessment support, mileage deductions and the ability to separate personal and business transactions from imported banking information. It doesn't support either MTD or multiple currencies, which could be a problem for self-employed people with a high turnover or international customers.

However, in this review, we're focusing on larger small-to-medium enterprises, which means we'll be looking at the higher tiers, which are compatible with Making Tax Digital. These are QuickBooks Essentials, with up to three registered users and a standard price of 18 per month, and QuickBooks Plus, with gives you five user seats and is priced at 27 per month (outside of special offer periods).

As well as MTD support for calculating and filing VAT, both of QuickBooks' higher tiers provide bill and payment management, multi-currency support, employee time tracking and payroll. All tiers allow you to invite your accountant to access your books free of charge.

Like many international Software-as-a-Service providers, Intuit's main data centres are located in the USA, covered by the EU-US Privacy Shield data export framework.

Intuit QuickBooks review: Setup and navigation

QuickBooks gently guides you through setting up your account, inviting you to submit details of your company and select the features you think you'll need - from construction industry tax tracking to retail sales management.

With that done, you're presented with the services' main interface, along with some suggestions to help you get started. These allow you to invite your accountant to access your account, set up your invoices, connect your bank, customise your profile and set up VAT. If you want to track time - useful in professions ranging from law to editing to technical support - you're also invited to add the TSheets module to your account.

After you've configured everything, the QuickBooks Dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of the state of your finances, including invoices due, your total expenses, sales charges and a profit and loss overview.

Key features are available from everywhere in the QuickBooks web app. At the top right of the interface, a plus sign gives you quick access to the creation interfaces for all kinds of invoices, reminder, receipts, timesheets, deposits and more. A help button at top right can connect you to both detailed tutorials and human support.

Intuit QuickBooks review: Customisation

There are loads of options to set up your account the way your business needs it, available in the Account and Settings options - your company name at the top of the page takes you there with a single click. In the Sales tab, you can change your invoicing terms, add shipping data, set a custom invoice numbering scheme and enable stock tracking - for QuickBooks Plus customers.

Here, you can upload a logo, update your contact details, company type, tax number and Companies House Registration Number. All this is automatically put onto your invoices.

Via the Banking tab, you can import data from your bank accounts in a number of different ways. The most convenient is via QuickBooks' account connection feature, which automatically links up with your bank account.

Most major UK, European and US banks are represented, including a number of digital challenger banks, although some of the most recent, such as Shine and TransferWise, aren't yet supported.

This includes personal accounts, even in QuickBooks' Essential and Plus tiers, which could be useful for VAT-registered sole traders or those in the process of moving to limited company status with legacy bank accounts to keep track of. However, if you use two-factor authentication for your account, you'll have to manually log in every time to import transactions.

Accounts without 2FA can automatically feed their transaction data into QuickBooks once you've set up the link. To connect banks that operate in foreign currencies, you'll first have to enable multicurrency mode in your Company Settings' Advanced tab.

If your bank isn't supported, you'll have to manually add your account and import transactions. You can do this in the Accounting section, by opening up your Chart of Accounts, clicking the New button on the right and entering your bank's relevant details.

To add transactions, you'll have to download them in CSV, QFX, QBO or OFX format from your bank. With that file to hand, you can go to the banking tab, select File Upload from the pull-down on the Update button, choose the relevant file and follow clear instructions to appropriately configure your transactions for QuickBooks. Once that's done, the account appears under Banking so you can easily go through your transactions.

This was by far the fiddliest part of the QuickBooks experience, and we'd appreciate a clearer account setup path for both unlisted banks and users who'd just rather not directly connect their bank account and prefer manual file uploads.

Intuit QuickBooks review: Doing business

With your accounts set up and your transactions imported, you're prompted to review and reconcile your bank transactions. QuickBooks makes a good stab at categorising content, particularly when you deal with well-known companies such as Google, but you'll probably want to add some new categories and manually assign smaller clients and businesses to an appropriate category.

To make this easier for future transaction reconciliation, you can create rules from your choices, so for example, you can set all payments to your ISP to be automatically categorised as telecoms expenses and put into the correct VAT category.

Once you've created some invoices, you'll also be able to reconcile incoming payments against money due from your clients. You can also import invoices - along with bills, bank data, client and supplier contact information, your chart of accounts and more, via QuickBook's Import Data features. Template files are provided to make the process as painless as possible and you can also import contacts from a Gmail or G-Suite account.

You're prompted to customise your invoices early on, thanks to the guided setup process. You can choose from a number of different invoice templates and tweak your fonts, colours and logo size, as well as optional elements such as a detailed VAT summary, deposits and discounts. You can also configure how invoice emails to your client will look and set up PayPal as your online payments processor to prompt rapid payment.

We were particularly impressed by QuickBooks's clear differentiation between products and services when it came to creating new items in our invoices, which makes it particularly well suited to the needs of service industry businesses.

Intuit QuickBooks review: Scaleable features

Both the QuickBooks Essentials and Plus tiers have full payroll features, including automatic tax and employer's pension contribution calculations for convenient submission to HMRC.

There are two different payroll options, which both cost 1 per paid employee, per month, but provide different features. QuickBooks Payroll is the simplest of these, including a single payment schedule - monthly or weekly - for all staff, a single auto-enrollment pension plan and automatic payroll data submission to HMRC.

The alternative PaySuite module requires a bit more hands-on management, but supports multiple payment schedules and pension plans, court-ordered salary deductions, and salary sacrifice schemes for pensions, give as you earn, cycle to work and more.

TSheets Time Tracking is an external Intuit product, for which you'll need to set up a separate account, but which integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks. It's free for a single user but additional TSheets user accounts are billed separately or as a block, so bear that in mind if you want to allow staff to track their own time. Features include payroll, billing, scheduling and project management support.

QuickBooks also provides a library of free and paid-for add-on apps and modules that give you extra features or allow you to conveniently connect third-party services. These include payment providers, online storefronts, planning and CRM suites.

There's a TSheets mobile app to help you and your staff track time, as well as both Android and iOS apps for QuickBooks itself, with different versions of self-assessment registered self-employed users and VAT-registered small businesses. These provide access to a wide range of features, allowing you to generate invoices, photograph receipts and keep on top of your business on the move.

Live and on-demand educational webinars are available to help you learn your way around QuickBooks, covering both general training and specific topics such as how to work with Making Tax Digital.

Intuit QuickBooks review: Verdict

QuickBooks is incredibly polished and comfortable to use. It has one of the best interfaces we've seen in an online accounting suite, doesn't provide any unexpected surprises and has a wealth of features, many of which you can neatly hide away if you don't need them.

We were slightly frustrated by the process of manually adding bank accounts without an online link and would prefer a clearer path and more complete documentation to help with this. Similarly, we'd have liked more options to mix-and-match features such as sole trade self-assessment support, MTD and multicurrency features. UK data centres would also have been a plus.

QuickBooks is nonetheless an absolutely top-notch accounting suite. The higher tiers are expensive, but the service's ease of use and broad range of features make it an excellent investment, and six-month discount offers are frequently available to new subscribers.

Verdict

QuickBooks packs in loads of features, has optional payroll charged per employee rather than in blocks, and a huge library of modules and extensiosn to connect third party services. The real stand-out feature here is a user interface that both looks polished and is very clear to use. It's not the cheapest accounting suite out there, but it's certainly one of the best.

The Xerox VersaLink C600DN is perfect for a print-hungry workforce. It claims fast 53ppm print speeds for colour and mono, and boasts a heavy-duty 15,000 page recommended monthly duty cycle. Max out the paper trays and you can also benefit from a huge total capacity of 3,250 sheets.

Inside, it employs Xerox's Hi-Q LED print engine and comes with USB 3 and Gigabit Ethernet ports as standard. Simultaneous 802.11n wireless services can be added via a 46 module that snaps in at the back.

What really sets the VersaLink range apart is Xerox's ConnectKey technology effectively an app store for your printer. On first contact, the C600DN gets you started with four preinstalled apps, providing quick access to printer settings, job status and USB device printing.

Want more? Simply create a cloud account and you can start browsing the App Gallery directly from the large 5in colour touchscreen. There's a great selection to choose from: cloud printing apps for Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box are all free, as is the @PrintByXerox app, which creates a password-protected account on the printer that you can use to view and release documents. If the touchscreen feels a little cramped, you can also access the App Gallery via a web browser: after we'd configured the printer's IP address, we had no problem installing apps remotely, seeing them pop up on the touchscreen in seconds.

Access controls are another strength of the VersaLink C600DN, allowing you to decide exactly which apps each user is allowed to use. Local and LDAP user authentication is supported, and the printer driver also exposes security features such as print and hold and PIN-secured prints.

While many apps are free, one thing you do have to pay for is the Xerox Print Management and Mobile Service (XPMMS). You can license this either by device or by job credit, with a 3,600-job credit costing 245. After we'd loaded its agent service on one PC on the LAN, we were able to provision remote printing for desktops and mobiles and enforce strict access controls.

From the user's perspective, remote printing is as close to transparent as you could ask for: we simply used the iOS PrintPortal app on our iPad to log into our XPMMS portal account, then added the C600DN as a favourite printer. With this done, we could print files and photos remotely, and send files to it directly from our iCloud Drive account.

Xerox's print-speed claims may seem quite ambitious, but the C600DN made good on them: our 53-page Word document printed in 60 seconds at both standard 600dpi and enhanced 1,200 x 2,400dpi resolutions. Large colour prints slowed it down a little, though: our 24-page DTP document printed at 53ppm at 600dpi, but only 44ppm in enhanced mode. Duplexing, on the other hand, was surprisingly fast: our 53-page Word document came out double-sided at an impressive 50ppm.

It's a winner when it comes to output quality too. The C600DN produced pin-sharp text and detailed mono photos, even on cheap 75gsm paper. Colour photos and graphics are very pleasing to the eye, with the driver's "Vivid RGB" setting adding extra pizazz to our reports and marketing material. And while the purchase price may be high, use the extra-high-yield cartridges and you'll be paying a mere 1.1p per mono page, and 6.4p for colour.

Busy SMBs that want a fast A4 colour printer with all the trimmings will find the VersaLink C600DN the perfect choice. It's fast, feature-packed and terrifically versatile, thanks to the ConnectKey app store. Factor in Xerox's lifetime warranty with an annual toner purchase and it's an almost irresistible deal.

Verdict

Busy SMBs that want a fast A4 colour printer with all the trimmings will find the VersaLink C600DN the perfect choice. It's fast, feature-packed and terrifically versatile, thanks to the ConnectKey app store. Factor in Xerox's lifetime warranty with an annual toner purchase and it's an almost irresistible deal.

600dpi A4 colour LED

53ppm A4 mono/colour

1.05GHz dual-core CPU

2GB RAM 5in colour touchscreen

Gigabit Ethernet NFC (Android only)

USB 3

Duplex

550-sheet paper tray

150-sheet bypass tray

Rec. monthly duty cycle, 15,000 pages

427 x 466 x 443mm (WDH)

29.4kg

Lifetime on-site warranty (with yearly toner purchase).

Options: 802.11n wireless, £47 productivity kit, £181 (all exc VAT)

Running costs

Extra-high toner: K (16.9K), £145

C, Y, M (16.8K), £270 each

K, C, Y, M drum units, (40K), £62 each.

Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 1.1p; colour, 6.4p

The days of tear-off payslips, brown envelopes and manual transfers are over. Smart companies are moving their payroll to the cloud, issuing digital advisories, and even paying by the minute, rather than making their staff wait weeks.

"One of the great things about the cloud is the speed at which a product can evolve," explained FreeAgent CEO Ed Molyneux. "Where tax and compliance are concerned, the goalposts are moving all the time... instead of having to issue updates whenever those changes roll out, we can implement them on our servers, and our users have instant access to the latest tax rates, bands and forms."

Tim Sheppard, CEO of MyPAYE, agrees. "You're always up to date we continuously update MyPAYE with legislative changes and new features," he said, adding that none of the updates have to be applied manually. "Support is built into the product."

"It's about peace of mind," said Hannah Wright, product marketing manager for Sage. "You pay us to be the experts on your behalf [so] when it comes to legislation and making sure all the tax bands are correct, all of our products seamlessly update so our customers don't need to worry."

Payroll has long been one of the more complex aspects of business accounting, and the advent of Real Time Information (RTI), which requires employers to submit payroll data to HMRC monthly, means that originating and storing that data in the same system they use to submit it makes sense. It also facilitates a degree of automation.

"When we think about things like tax and payroll filing, [the latter of which] needs to be done on a monthly basis, there's an element of asking what value is being added by somebody having to press a button that says go and do it?" Molyneux said. "If you're running an IT contracting business, with a standard payroll that goes out every month and you didn't have to do anything previously apart from pay yourself maybe we can think about RTI payroll in that way. How far can we get towards full automation?"

PSD2, the EU's forthcoming second Payment Services Directive, allows cloud providers to go even further, executing payments, settling bills and more, all from within their payroll systems. "It will allow services such as FreeAgent to instigate payments in a safe and secure way, which makes payroll more straightforward because employers won't need separate arrangements, outside of their payroll system," said Molyneux.

Cost savings

Cloud-based payroll providers gather a huge amount of data, and while regulations and the obligations of professional conduct mean they can't use it without their clients' permission, sufficient anonymised transactions teach vendors more about each one, allowing them to be tagged and filed more accurately. The time savings this can deliver for smaller businesses could be significant, and would help offset the cost of their monthly subscriptions. But that's not the only saving they could make.

"If you take the average Sage 50 customer who prints and posts their payslips, converting to [our] online portal and sending their employees' payslips digitally would save 1,900 per year," claimed Hannah Wright. The average client employs just 39 people. For larger firms, the savings could be more significant.

MyPAYE CEO Tim Sheppard is similarly confident. "At just 1 per month per paid employee, switching to MyPAYE will save most employers money," he said, adding that conventional payroll packages "need periodic updates installing, they need backups running. This all takes time and costs money."

Offloading your payroll to the cloud also delivers the benefits we afford our documents when we store them on Dropbox and Google Drive: someone else looks after the infrastructure, and keeps them secure and backed up.

"Payroll is full of personal data," said Wright. "With the advent of GDPR, people are going to have to take more seriously how they protect it. Payroll in the cloud is an easy way to look after your data, and transferring it to the employee is also much more secure than using an email system."

To this end, Sage exposes different levels of data to different kinds of user. Employees can submit time sheets and view their payslips online, department heads can see a subset of their team members' information, and accountants get a full overview. "[Cloud payroll is] giving employees of small and medium-sized businesses access to the kind of tools that you would usually only associate with larger firms, because they tend to be quite costly," said Wright. "This helps the business in terms of loyalty and attracting talent."

"Personal data is encrypted in the database automatically," said Sheppard, emphasising that this is all the more important with the approach of GDPR. "Payslips can be emailed to employees as encrypted PDF documents with individual passwords for the employee. Reports can be sent to managers or clients as encrypted PDFs. Security is fundamental to MyPAYE."

Payroll innovation

London-based Etch, built on the Ethereum blockchain, is perhaps the most employee-focused payroll system to date. Staff paid through the Etch platform are given an employee debit card and smartphone app, and are paid by the minute.

"Each employee is issued with a MasterCard-backed payroll card which stores their earnings," said Etch CEO Euros Evans. "If a beacon shows that they're in the right place, a linked app will show a per-second increase in the balance on the card. Technically, this balance is an IOU that can be cashed in at any time, so if at lunchtime they have 40 in the wallet, they can go and spend 40 with their card."

The system, which has just taken on its first client, is likely to appeal to businesses in the minimum-pay and low-pay sectors. Employees can split their monthly income into pots, to make budgeting easier, with rent and other essentials locked off until they're due. It also provides an easy way for expats to send money home.

"We use the blockchain and the employees' smart contracts to make sure that the list of exact money that each employee has earned is updated, so when the employee uses the card to take money out of an ATM or pay for something, we have an API that will give authority to MasterCard to take the money from the employer's account," said Evans.

Employers will no longer need to enact a payroll run at the end of the month, and employees don't even need to have their own bank account.

Evans talks of the system in terms of "streaming" money. "There are several things that you can do with that stream. If you're on a low wage with no credit, then right now you need to get a pre-paid electricity meter installed because the supplier doesn't trust that you'll pay the quarterly bill. This costs an average of 200 a year more [than a regular utility account]. In the world of streaming money, it won't take long for the energy company to see that it can tap into that stream and customers can pay them in real-time, too. So, the energy company can offer a better rate to somebody on that system than on conventional quarterly billing."

Etch has ambitious plans to extend into New York and Singapore in 2018. If successful, payroll won't just be different: it will be unrecognisable from the days of paper payslips and cash in brown envelopes.

Smartphone sales around the world will remain weak in 2018 due to lower demand and fewer replacement purchases, according to a report by market analyst TrendForce.

Due to a continuous rise in the costs of upstream components, downstream mobile phone vendors have to reconsider the pricing or adjust the specification of end-products to cope with the cost pressures, the report said. This means the distribution of market share among the major players is expected to remain generally the same as last year.

TrendForce, therefore, estimates the global smartphone production for 2018 at around 1.5 billion units, a 2.8% annual growth only, down from previously expected 5%.

"Looking back to global smartphone market in 2017, the sales in [the first half] were weaker than expected since the demand was affected by the anticipated launch of new iPhones in [the second half of 2017]," the report stated.

"In the second half of the year, major smartphone brands put focus on all-screen models, hoping to boost the replacement purchases at the year end, but the sales turned out to be lower than expected. Therefore, since the mid [fourth quarter], smartphone vendors have lowered their quarterly production plans due to the huge cost pressures brought by excessive inventory."

According to TrendForce, the handset manufacturers with the biggest potential for the future are Apple and Nokia, and were quoted as "the only international brands with a clear future of growth in 2018".

As the industry leader, the analysts said Samsung will remain the top for smartphone production this year and is expected to continue the success of its budget smartphones, the Galaxy A and J series.

"The smartphone production volume of Samsung is estimated at 300 million units in 2018, a decrease of 5% year on year," said the report.

Despite IDC's latest report stating that Apple overtook Samsung in the smartphone sales for the last quarter of 2017, TrendForce believes Apple will "remain in second place in the ranking of smartphone production for 2017".

For this year, Apple is set to launch three new flagship models in the third quarter, expanding the adoption of Face ID and all-screen technology in these new iPhones, along with upgrading their existing functions and increasing the memory content as well.

As a result, TrendForce said iPhone's annual production volume will increase by 6% because of improved specifications of new iPhones and Apple's expansion in the Indian market.

As for LG, who previously announced its withdrawal from the Chinese market, TrendForce's report stated that the Korean tech giant is an example of how international brands are finding it harder to survive in the Chinese market, where there is growing support for domestic brands.

"More importantly, international brands have difficulty to stay profitable in China because the offerings of the domestic brands have higher performance-price ratios," the analysts added.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group is being investigated by the Financial Conduct Authority over of an IT glitch that blighted 17.5 million of its customers last June.

The company, which owns the NatWest and Ulster Bank brands, was forced to apologise last summer after a botched software update resulted in overnight bank transfers failing for millions of customers.

As a result, many missed rent, mortgage and salary payments, prompting RBS to automatically waive overdraft fees for those affected.

Some Ulster Bank customers also reported problems accessing their accounts for several weeks afterwards.

Banking sector regulator FCA confirmed yesterday that it is investigating the IT failure and will rule in due course whether or not to take action against RBS.

"The FCA has started to conduct an enforcement investigation into the IT failures at RBS which affected the bank's customers in June and July 2012," said the FCA in a statement.

"[The organisation will] reach its conclusions in due course and will decide whether or not enforcement action should follow that investigation," it added.

News of the investigation comes a month after Natwest customers were hit by another technical glitch that prevented them from withdrawing cash or making online payments for several hours.

In a statement, RBS described last summer's IT problems as "unacceptable" and vowed to work closely with UK regulators to investigate the case.

"We have already made significant improvements and over the next three years will invest hundreds of millions in our systems," the company said.

"We will be working closely with our regulators in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Our customers deserve a service they can rely on 100% of the time and that is what we want to provide."

National Grid has implemented a new cloud-based payments processing service from Bottomline Technologies to increase processing security and efficiency for its treasury payments.

The firm has chosen Bottomline's cloud-based Swift Access Service to manage cash more effectively while reducing operational risk.

Bottomline said its cloud-based service offered a more reliable, efficient and cost effective alternative to in-house Swift connections for corporations and financial institutions. It said that the cloud service increases security required for high value payment operations alongside significant efficiency and cost benefits.

The subscription-based Software as a Service facilitates rapid on-boarding to Swift and shorter deployment timescales. It said that this would ensure more rapid realisation of business benefits.

Mark Flawn, assistant treasurer at National Grid, said that access to accurate and timely balance and transaction reporting data, greater security and operational efficiency helped "build the business case for us to choose a cloud-based SWIFT Service Bureau model."

"This fits with the strategic initiative at National Grid to use remotely hosted solutions where possible. We are able to achieve better results by using a cloud platform, as it removes the overhead of maintaining the infrastructure on our own servers which in turn frees up both our Treasury and IT resources," he said.

Nigel Savory, managing director, Europe at Bottomline Technologies said that customers were able to achieve the goal of enhancing visibility and rapid access to cash with the service "as well as a range of value-added payments and cash management solutions which enable our customers to leverage their investment in Swift for an even greater on-going return on investment."

IT workers effectively received a 4.3 per cent pay rise last year, making them much better off than their non-tech peers but still at a loss thanks to inflation.

So claims stats provided by business and technology staffing company ReThink Recruitment, which showed, in 2011, the average IT salary was 40,140. This compared with 38,500 in 2010.

The UK average for pay rises, meanwhile, was just 2.3 per cent.

While that all sounds great for those working in the IT industry, the figures aren't as positive as they might appear at first glance.

An RPI inflation of 5.2 per cent in 2011 equates to a decrease of 360 in actual earnings for IT staff, while the UK's average loss was 675.

"Although pay for IT staff has shown positive growth over the last year, runaway inflation will have eroded take home pay," said ReThink director Michael Bennett.

"Salaries for many IT staff have actually fallen in real terms. However, when compared with the average UK worker, IT staff salaries are still ahead of the game. Everyone has taken a hit, but less so for people in IT."

There could be good news on the horizon, though. With the current inflation rate down to 3.5 per cent, the rise may outstrip inflation next year, according to Bennett.

"There is much more demand for IT talent these days. IT has the most demand across all sectors, from retail to healthcare," he added.

But he was cautious about being too optimistic, citing the second economic downturn and Greece's financial woes as a possible obstacle to UK IT growth.

"We're confident, but not stupidly confident. It's a good sector to be in, but anything could happen right now," he said.

Long-term pay rise statistics also look favourable for IT workers. The national average wage has increased by 13.7 per cent from 2006 to 2011, from 21,160 to 24, 050. Average IT salaries, however, increased by 16.3 per cent, from 34,500 to 40,140.

"Pay for IT workers is now recovering well," Bennet added.

"IT directors are finding it increasingly difficult to retain and motivate staff with years of back-to-back pay freezes. Our annual survey of IT directors found that are more willing to increase pay."

Sage has teamed up with Rackspace to launch customer relationship management (CRM) as a service to small businesses in the UK.

The business software company has introduced a cloud version of SageCRM to be hosted on Rackspace's new hybrid hosting technology, RackConnect

Announcing the relationship, Lorcan Malone, general manager for SageCRM said the product had been designed to help businesses grow by not over-committing resources at an early stage.

Sage CRM Cloud will initially be available in two versions: Essentials, which offers basic CRM functionality and is charged from 20 per month and a Professionals edition, which offers a complete set of functionality, including sales and marketing support. This version is priced from 40 per month.

Features of SageCRM include full contact management and business analytics, smartphone functionality, security over customer data and flexible payment options. The product is also offered on a 30-day free trial basis.

In addition, Malone said that one of the key benefits was that, as opposed to some software vendors, cost of support was included in the price.

With the CRM SaaS space dominated by Salesforce, Sage will obviously have its work cut out to take on its giant competitor but Malone said the company was confident that it could find its niche.

"Salesforce generally aims at companies just above our target market, but it's certainly true that it's looking at the SMB space more," he said. "Our strength, however, is that we're focused exclusively on SMBs and we benefit [them through] our partner support."

Apple has published its supplier responsibility report for 2012 as it looks to distance itself from reports of worker mistreatment and poor environmental records.

It marks the first time Apple has openly published a list of its suppliers, hinting at greater openness from a company that has traditionally kept its cards close to its chest.

The Foxconn factory suicides of 2010 did not shine well on the company, even though the complex was responsible for manufacturing hardware for other tech giants, including Dell and HP.

There is still a lot of work to be done in the area of environmental impact.

In 2011, an explosion at Foxconn's Chengdu factory killed four employees and injured 18 others. There was also an explosion at another Apple supplier facility in Shanghai, run by Ri-Teng, which injured 59.

Apple has also come under fire for its environmental work as well. Last year, a Greenpeace report named the iPhone maker the least green tech company. Apple has continually boasted about its eco-friendly credentials, however.

The company chose to carry out 229 audits across its supply chain in 2011, representing an 80 per cent increase over 2010. In particular, Apple focused more heavily on Asian countries, such as China and Malaysia.

"Apple is committed to driving the highest standards for social responsibility throughout our supply base," the report read.

"We require that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made."

Apple did find a number of violations going against its Supplier Code of Conduct, saying it was working with suppliers to correct issues.

There were six cases where underage workers were being employed across five facilities.

"In each case, the facility had insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation," Apple found. "We found no instances of intentional hiring of underage labour."

When looking into discrimination, Apple found 56 facilities that did not have policies and procedures prohibiting discriminatory practices based on pregnancy. Another 52 did not have procedures in place to prevent discrimination based on results of medical tests.

The company also discovered 42 facilities violated payment practice rules, whilst 68 did not provide benefits as required by national laws.

At 93 facilities, over 50 per cent of workers were exceeding weekly working hour limits of 60.

Apple detailed what it was doing to improve conditions at its supplier complexes. At the troubled Shenzen factory in China, workers now have access to psychological counseling, including a 24-hour hotline.

Employee assistance programmes, designed by mental health experts, have been introduced at another three facilities.

Apple said it recognised "there is still a lot of work to be done in the area of environmental impact." It has committed to various improvements, including an expansion of the number of specialised environmental audits across its supply chain.

Sage has announced a new member of its cloud product family in the shape of Sage One Payroll.

The cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) is targeted specifically at small businesses, with 15 or fewer employees, which might not have the skills in-house to run an efficient payroll system.

The key to the software is automation, making it easier for a non-payroll specialist to use. As well as recording and updating P11 records, it also ensures it is up-to-date with any regulatory changes and works out for the business what statutory payments need to be made.

At the end of the financial year, a tool comes into play for producing reports to send directly to HMRC, removing the need to duplicate the info for the tax office.

All of this can then be accessed by your accountant and any corrections that need to be made can be easily adjusted in the system.

"Sage has a fantastic pedigree within the payroll software space and this expertise has helped shape and inform our first SaaS payroll product," said Chris Stonehouse, head of Sage Online.

"We also spent a lot of time consulting with small businesses and their insights fed into every element from the design to the language used, enabling us to create what we believe is one of the industry's most user-friendly pieces of software for processing the pay run."

The price point is appealing too. Sticking to a pay per seat philosophy, Sage One Payroll comes in at 5 for up to five users, 10 for 10 and 15 for 15. But, even better, businesses can use the service for free up until July 2012.

There is also support around the product, with 24 hour phone lines open for 365 of the year.

The worldwide market for mobile applications is set to exceed US$35 billion (22 billion) by 2014, according to a forecast from industry analysts IDC. Application downloads are expected to reach 76.9 billion a year, up from 10.9 billion a year today. The apps market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 60 per cent.

So far, application developers have written more than 300,000 apps for devices such as the iPhone and Android handsets. According to Scott Ellison, a vice president for research at IDC and one of the report's authors, one of the most interesting developments in the market is the wide range of programs being developed, and the number of topics they cover.

IDC identified applications ranging from recipe and cooking hints to software that turns a smart phone into a torch, through to enterprise applications including fleet management and payroll. "Mobile app developers will 'appify' just about every interaction you can think of in your physical and digital worlds," said Ellison.

IDC's predictions for the mobile apps market are significantly ahead of other analysts' estimates; research house Juniper, for example, said recently that it expected the annual market for apps to reach 25 billion by 2015.

Microsoft is discontinuing its Office Accounting software, in yet another indication that the company is giving up on financial software.

In an email sent today to customers, Microsoft said it will no longer distribute the Office Accounting product, and will start pulling key features within six weeks.

"We are writing to let you know that we will no longer distribute Microsoft Office Accounting after 16 November 2009," the email stated.

"On 30 October 2009, Microsoft will transfer customer support for Office Accounting in the UK to Mamut Software Ltd. Product support for Office Accounting will continue in accordance with the published Microsoft product support life cycle."

Customers are being offered a "free upgrade" to Mamut Business Software.

Microsoft said customers can continue to use the Office Accounting software, but add-on features such as payroll and ePayments will be discontinued from 15 December, giving companies only six weeks to make alternative arrangements. A Microsoft support notice said the company is in discussions with ePayments provider, Albany, to help customers migrate.

Last year, Microsoft caused enormous upset after it dropped support for its Money product, which many people rely on for online banking.

Morrisons' intention to buy 38 Co-op and former Somerfield stores may hold integration challenges for the UK's fourth largest supermarket chain.

The 223-million deal it's largest since acquiring Somerfield in 2004 for 3 billion would fit well within its existing, 150-strong smaller store format, the retailer revealed in its 2008 third-quarter trading statement late last week.

It will also presumably be looking to take advantage of the fact that the Co-op is an extensive Oracle Retail software user, as it continues to transition to its own deployment of the suite.

Morrisons announced a major 110-million strategic commitment to Oracle's retail portfolio in February this year as part of a three-year IT investment project.

But the nature of the Morrisons deployment could test the further integration requirements of the newly acquired Co-op stores, given the fact it is one of the first organisations to undertake a significant new, prototype deployment of the entire Oracle suite of industry specific products.

The retailer's ongoing migration away from costly legacy products includes the deployment of Oracle Retail merchandising, planning and stores applications, the Oracle E-Business Suite for financials, human resources (HR) and payroll and manufacturing and Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) software.

At an infrastructure level, it has been deploying Oracle Fusion middleware, including the vendor's service oriented architecture (SOA) identity management, and database products on HP hardware.

At the time, Morrisons IT director Gary Barr, said the Oracle deal would "promote a more accurate assessment of business performance".

In acquiring the Co-op stores, Morrisons said it would also spend a further 98 million on acquisition, integration and refurbishment costs in a six-month phased handover of the stores that will begin early next year.

But the acquisition news and challenges ahead were set in the context of solid sales figures for its third quarter, with sales excluding fuel up 8.1 per cent on the previous quarter.

The figures build on the record 612-million profit it announced in March earlier this year and mark a turnaround in Morrison's fortunes compared to the 313-million loss it faced in 2006 that led to founder, Sir Ken Morrison standing down as chairman. At the time, Morrisons faced stiff criticism from City analysts for struggling to integrate its Safeway acquisition.

The organisation responsible for providing payroll and other accounting functions for the National Health Service (NHS) has signed a new strategic third-party payroll deal.

NHS Shared Business Services will work with existing managed services provider Steria, to implement workforce optimisation and electronic rostering systems from Manpower Software, to deliver efficient and improved payroll data to NHS organisations.

The alliance has been designed to help NHS organisations save money through reduced administration, more accurate payroll data and automatic entry of data into the NHS' Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system.

"NHS Shared Business Services has given the NHS the freedom to concentrate on its core function of providing local people with high quality clinical care. Our partnership with Manpower Software will drive forward our strategy in providing an increasing range of software applications that have been hand-picked to deliver faster, streamlined and more cost efficient processing right across the NHS," said Jim Vincent, managing director of NHS Shared Business Services.

Over 100 NHS organisations use NHS Shared Business Services to provide outsourced payroll services.

Paul Scandrett, Manpower Software's director of Healthcare added that the electronic recording of staff payment enhancements from their completed duties would reduce the administration burden currently facing NHS organisations.

The adoption of "cloud computing" technology and approaches has led to confusion in the market that could hamper its effective deployment by businesses, according to Gartner.

The analyst said the confusion comes from not clearly differentiating between the internet, web or software-as-a-service (SaaS) based applications that are delivered through the "cloud" and those internet technology infrastructure components used to deliver applications to multiple external customers.

"Mixing the discussion of cloud-enabling technologies' with cloud computing services' creates confusion," said David Mitchell Smith, Gartner vice president and fellow.

So much so, "the term cloud computing has come to mean two very different things: a broader use that focuses on cloud,' and a more-focused use on system infrastructure and virtualisation," he added.

Only last month, Gartner predicted cloud computing would be one of the technology enabling trends that will change the way business is done in the future.

But Smith said it is important to understand the two different prevailing perspectives and set the proper expectations to obtain the anticipated benefits from the massively scalable IT-related capabilities cloud computing.

"This cloud is a global-class phenomenon and a high-level concept that can refer to a range of services extending from system infrastructure (for example, compute services and storage services) through applications (for example, customer relationship management) and business processes (for example, payroll services)," said Gartner.

The second popular perspective is of the use of technologies, including virtualisation and automation that focus more on the computing than on the cloud aspect, with emphasis placed on the technologies that enable the creation and delivery of service-based capabilities, as an extension of traditional data centre approaches for instance.

Smith was, however, quick to point out the connection between the two. "Any provider of cloud computing services must have an environment that includes an infrastructure to support their delivery," he said.

For example, virtualisation is often used to implement this underlying infrastructure to support cloud computing service delivery. "Cloud system infrastructure services are a subset of cloud computing, but not the entire picture," he added.

Gartner advised that, while cloud computing services and technologies are both valuable and should be pursued, IT organisations should clearly separate initiatives involving cloud computing and its services from the use of cloud computing-related concepts and technologies for the creation of internal systems.

The Carphone Warehouse is using new workforce management software, after trialling the affects of store staffing levels on customer conversion rates.

The new software will automate the management of its retail workforce in seven European countries - including the UK - so the company can optimise the numbers of staff it has with its busiest times of day in terms of customer footfall.

A proof-of-concept trial measuring customer traffic against sales figures through 15 stores revealed a direct correlation between the number of staff available in store and customer conversions. As a result, Carphone Warehouse has selected workforce management system, Kronos for Retail.

Mercedes Garcia, Business Change Function European senior project manager at Carphone Warehouse, said: "The solution is functionally rich, flexible, and able to manage the specific policy and legislative requirements of the seven countries in which it is to be deployed."

The software will be used to help automate the optimisation of the mobile phone retailer's complex rotas, which fluctuate according to store opening hours and peak periods, and which often require the use of temporary staff.

Using historical trading data and projected sales forecasts, the Kronos system will be used to create optimum schedules to minimise under- and over-staffing and to reduce Carphone's dependency on temporary staff.

The new system's time and attendance module will also manage absences, ensure payroll accuracy and reduce administration costs. Biometric terminals will be installed to guarantee the 100 per cent accuracy of employee attendance data collected.

Garcia added: "Kronos will allow us to manage employee schedules by accurately matching staffing requirements to customer demand. We expect substantial improvements in customer conversion rates as a result.

"The time and attendance element will help us to reduce payroll inflation, generate payroll management overhead savings, and give us real-time visibility to manage our labour resources. We expect customers will experience a greater level of service with more staff available to meet their requirements."

Grocery chain Morrisons has today announced a strategic commitment to Oracle software as part of its publicly declared intention to transform its IT infrastructure in support of future growth and performance improvements.

The deal follows Morrison chief executive, Marc Bolland's comments last year on the occasion of the retailer's end-of-year results. Then, he stated it would embark on a 110 million three-year IT investment project.

As part of the deal, the UK's fourth largest supermarket group will be one of the first organisations to make a significant new, prototype investment in the entire Oracle suite of products. These include its Retail-specific merchandising, planning and stores applications and the Oracle E-Business Suite for financials, human resources (HR) and payroll and manufacturing.

The investment is also made up of Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) software; Oracle Fusion middleware, including Oracle service oriented architecture (SOA) suite and Oracle identity management, and Oracle's database products.

Gary Barr, Morrisons IT director said: "We expect Oracle solutions to meet our needs, offering a breadth of functionality and a level of data that will promote a more accurate assessment of business performance. This will help us to turn information into profitable business decisions and deliver an enhanced experience to the 9 million customers that walk through our doors each week."

The agreement with Oracle marks Morrisons' decision not to develop its legacy systems in-house, after identifying that they could not effectively support the company's plans for growth.The supermarket will implement the Oracle products over the next five years as the enabling part of its business transformation programme and to improve the customer shopping experience in its UK 375 stores.

Morrisons' business model includes handling the sourcing and distribution of its products in-house, with an end-to-end supply chain. Oracle added that it would help the grocery retailer manage and simplify retail processes around fresh and staple produce throughout the planning process, through the supply chain and into the stores.

NHS Scotland has signed a 3.6 million contract with IT supplier COA Solutions, to provide a shared software solution for all of its 22 health boards.

COA Solutions supplies integrated business management and information systems to public, private and non-for-profit service sector organisations. It has more than 450 staff servicing clients such as WH Smith, Royal Bank of Scotland, National Express and the NHS.

It will provide NHS Scotland with a 'health business suite' as part of a shared support services programme. The software combines core financial management, procurement, human resource and payroll systems, and the service will be fully rolled out by March 2009.

Many of the health boards were already been using the software: "The majority of NHS Scotland's financial transactions were already going through COA Solutions, so it made sense to build on this solid foundation and to work with COA to enhance and extend the health business suite," said John Francis, programme director of the shared support services programme.

He added: "The software has been developed to fully support the re-engineered business processes and help deliver the identified improvements."

The COA Solutions software implementation is part of a Scottish drive to improve efficiency and save 1 billion by 2009-10. Starting in 2004, its goal was to attack waste, bureaucracy and duplication in Scotland's public sector.

NHS National Services Scotland, the body overseeing the move, said that the ability to access and analyse data from all boards will improve decision making. Staff will also be able to view financial documents electronically, freeing up storage space, stopping loss of documents and saving costs on off-site storage.

J Barbour & Sons

has just signed a five-year contract to streamline spreadsheet-reliant processes and improve the management of its 500-strong workforce with new human capital management (HCM) software.

The outdoor clothing manufacturer and brand currently administers its existing payroll system, together with HR records, using a variety of spreadsheets and word documents that are difficult to manage and prone to manual error.

The multi-site organisation, which covers both manufacturing and retail operations and employs almost 500 employees on a monthly or weekly salary basis, will initially deploy core human resources (HR), payroll and time and attendance software modules from specialist provider TeamSpirit

TeamSpirit's Time and Attendance module will also be integrated with feedback data terminals to collect employees' working hours, as they 'clock' in and out.

Barbour said its decision to select TeamSpirit was based on its ability to provide HR, payroll and time and attendance functionality in one, integrated system. And Barbour's financial director had had previous experience with its systems.

"We are excited at the prospect of implementing TeamSpirit which will integrate a number of business functions in a single piece of software," said Neil Harper, Barbour's IT development manager.

He said the company's long-term reliance on manual processes meant "we were forever importing data from spreadsheets into our payroll system."

He added: "[Now] we can look forward to many of these processes becoming automated; the flexibility of the system will also provide us with the ability to link to other internal systems."

Lottery operator Camelot today said it had completed a transition of its SAP back office environment to a new managed service ahead of time and under budget.

The company has signed a multi-year SAP application management services contract with IT services company, Atos Origin. The migration of Camelot's back office SAP environment was completed in just two weeks.

Camelot IT director, Neil Kellar spoke exclusively to IT PRO about the strategic thinking behind the contract, saying that outsourcing the key systems handled by SAP was always part of its plans when it began to migrate to the software platform back in 2005.

"We have a track record in building gaming systems, so decided to go for as vanilla an implementation of SAP as possible a couple of years ago to build back-end lottery IT systems for the future," he said.

The SAP systems provide the back office financials, human resources (HR), payroll, business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions for the lottery operator.

Kellar said: "Our SAP systems are critical in terms of information management. For example, we implemented SAP in our supply chain in July and August of last year to help in areas like order consolidation, where we can now get orders to retailers in the most efficient way."

Atos Origin began working with Camelot on management and development of its SAP systems while Camelot was preparing its successful bid for the next UK lottery licence, submitted earlier this year.

"The key thing for us was to move towards open standards," Kellar added. "It's important for our back office to interface with our major gaming systems, where we now have over three million players registered to play on the internet, interactive TV and mobile phones."

He said that Camelot would be able to access business-specific integration and project management skills through the Atos contract that will allow the operator "to scale resources to peaks and drops in demand".

"It's important to keep our SAP implementation as simple as possible to ensure the lowest possible cost of ownership and flexibility to change the systems," Kellar added, citing the fact that the transition of Camelot's SAP environment to Atos management came in ahead of time in just two weeks, as well a sunder budget.

Atos will work with Camelot on its next phase of SAP-based IT transformation which includes plans to complete retailer management systems by February 2009, when its third licence period begins. This will enable the rollout of 27,600 new lottery terminals - the largest network of its kind in the world.

Holland & Barrett, the health foods and supplements retail chain, is investing in new management software to manage store-based tasks.

The company is updating processes in its stores with new web-based software that will enable it to manage products, pricing, promotions, training and general administration in its 500 stores over a broadband network.

Jason Oakley, Holland & Barrett buying director said existing processes are largely paper-based and communicated via post, fax and telephone, which is proved time-consuming, costly and prone to error.

The retailer has purchased three web-based business forms within the software package Retail Manager from IT software and services specialist Triangle, that are due to go live in September 2007. They are Accidents and Incidents, Starters and Leavers and Petty Cash and link directly to other databases, such as Planner, so that all events are managed as a workflow.

For example, for Starters and Leavers, there is a direct link to human resources (HR) and Payroll, so that pay scales and commissions can be calculated according to training levels achieved.

The web-based format of Retail Manager automatically knows which store is using the systems so that it can display all forms in the relevant Holland & Barrett fascia. And the business is looking to streamline data collection and management processes to deliver cost and efficiency savings to its bottom line, as well as improve customer service levels.

"By automating these and other processes, we expect to be able to provide a better service to our stores and enable our associates to move from administrative tasks to serving customers," said Oakley.

Women working in the IT industry believe they aren't being paid fairly, but they are beginning to get savvier about the issue, according to research from IT-industry body Intellect.

The annual Perceptions of Equal Pay survey of more than 350 women in the technology industry found that over half believe their male coworkers are better paid for similar work. While 35 per cent of those surveyed said they believe they are paid less fairly but had no proof, nearly one in five said they are certain men earn more for the same work.

Those statistics mark an increase of five per cent for the former and nine per cent for the latter over last year's results, showing women are paying more attention to the issue, said Gillian Arnold, a sales manager at IBM and chair at Intellect's Women in IT forum in London yesterday. "Even more women are perceiving this to be the case," said Arnold. "I suspect women are becoming more savvy."

Intellect said that the number of women in the IT sector has fallen to 16 per cent - this despite a widely accepted skills shortage in a sector worth 10 per cent of the UK economy. Because of this, keeping and attracting women employees is key for the IT industry.

"Even if women feel unsure they are getting the same [pay], they still acted on it... They go and find alternative work or careers and possibly move outside the IT industry," said Arnold. "They will gravitate to those institutions and organisations which offer an equitable environment."

The differential in IT pay could cause other problems for firms. The number of equal pay claims across sectors has jumped from 12,393 in 2005 to over 27,497 last year, according to Employment Tribunal statistics supplied by SpeechlyBircham employment solicitor Emma Bartlett.

Shelia Wild, employment policy director at the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), stressed that equal pay is not just a matter of principle, but of practice. When women are paid less for equal work, it means, in the long run, they have less of a pension to retire on - something considered by the Employment Tribunal when they're making claims payouts, Bartlett noted.

But dealing with equal pay issues isn't easy. "Unless you understand the barriers, you can't fix it," said Arnold. "A lot of discrimination is unintended."

One of the barriers is the "old boys' network," said Arnold. Women can help overcome this on their own by networking. "Old boys networks are places people get jobs, so if you're not plugged into networks, you won't get the same rate of progression," she said.

She also noted the tendency for people - male or female - to hire in their own image. Arnold said if people realise they do this "homosocial reproduction," then they're more likely to overcome it and hire someone a bit different.

Another issue is women's willingness to ask for raises. Arnold cited a separate study, recently completed by Claire Keogh and Angela Tattersall at the University of Salford, which found women did not negotiate for pay as well as men did, with three-quarters saying they found it hard to simply ask for a pay raise, and half reporting they are uncomfortable promoting their own skills.

"You can be damned sure male counterparts are nagging like hell," said Arnold. "But if they recruit in their own image, do they dole out cash in their own image, too?"

The EOC's Wild said that younger women may have already learned this lesson. "I wonder how different age groups behave. I wouldn't go in and ask for a pay raise, whereas my daughter does quite frequently," she said. "If young women are better at negotiating, let's build on that."

One area of improvement has been flexible working. More women work part-time than men, but introducing different ways of working could help keep women in the IT workforce for longer, adding to the pool of skilled employees available for firms.

"It's absolutely vital to get men in on the flexible working act. It's not just to be nice to them or to better share the burden of home life, but to strengthen women's position," said Wild. "Sharing out flexible working with men is really, really important."

Also at issue for all employees is transparency around pay. Some 64 per cent of respondents to the Salford study said culture surrounding pay in companies using IT were not transparent, and women were not encouraged or allowed to ask colleagues about their pay rates.

The speakers at the meeting urged companies to undertake Equal Pay audits, which look at reasons for differences in pay between comparable employees. According to the Intellect survey, three-quarters of women would be more likely to work for a company which had conducted such an audit and only four per cent of companies surveyed have done actively carried one out. But the speakers also said such firms should be given the time to fix any differentials found in private, without being attacked in the media or even by employees.

The speakers also stressed the importance of getting pay systems right. Wild noted one company that managed to sort out unfair pay differentials after installing payroll software which allowed salaries to be viewed company-wide. The majority (70 per cent) of women said organisations are doing a good job encouraging women to apply for promotions, with a similar number expecting to be treated fairly when applying for that promotion.

Luxury department store retailer Harrods has completed the final stage of a strategic migration to SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) 2005.

The migration has enabled the company to standardise and streamline its IT infrastructure, providing the platform for technology to play a greater role in optimising business performance.

Harrods IT director, David Llamas told IT PRO the company is now building on the completion of its migration to SAP version 4.6C, a project which started in 2002 when he first joined the retailer. "At that time we were running version 4.0B and had completed our initial upgrade to 4.6C so that some areas of the business, like general merchandising for instance, were running on SAP," he said.

"But different departments such as furniture, which is often made to order or food and beverage, which has a lot of fast-moving products and so has different KPIs [key performance indicators], each also ran their own legacy systems developed to meet their own specific requirements."

Llamas brought in the requirement to standardise business and data management processes and so move the entire company's operations onto the SAP backbone. "We did the re-engineering of our processes in SAP and standardised them as much as we could, in areas like goods receipt procedure and invoice matching, for example," he said. "Once we had build the core system business model we migrated the rest of the legacy systems onto SAP."

Since completing the migration last October, the company now has a "single version of the truth," according to Llamas, although each department retains the special requirements needed to have meaningful visibility of their sales and product data. Harrods now has one product catalogue to manage its 1.4 million product items or stock keeping units (SKUs), which has helped improved the granularity of reporting.

Shrinkage has been reduced to 0.7 per cent largely due to better tracking of stock from the warehouse to point of sale, while invoice matching referenced by Llamas as manually intensive and with a relatively low success rate, is now 80 per cent with the help of supplier portals and electronic data integration (EDI) with SAP.

"Now we have completed the back office consolidation, IT running costs have dropped to 0.7 per cent of sales - its lowest level since 1999," said Llamas. "The quality of the data has also improved and, from my point of view, that's a prerequisite for data mining and analytics in decision-making processes, or business intelligence (BI)."

The migration has also underpinned major IT infrastructure refresh of its paper-based warehouse systems, electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) systems, data centre and online presence to name just a few areas. Llamas added: "Using EAI [enterprise application integration] tools from Sun [formerly SeeBeyond] we've also been able to integrate new people management systems, including time and attendance - which we didn't have before - as well as HR and payroll."

Global investment firm Hellman & Friedman has acquired two UK software companies in a 500 million spending spree.

The private equity company acquired London-based Computer Services Group, which specialises in enterprise back office software, and Iris Software, a provider of accounting, business and payroll systems.

"Both Iris and CS Group are exceptional businesses with strong positions in key verticals, high levels of subscription revenue and tremendous future growth potential," said Stephen Ducket, managing director of Hellman & Friedman. "We see excellent opportunities for further organic growth supplemented by continued complementary acquisitions."

CS Group left the stock market just four weeks ago, following a 91 million deal to take it private that was backed by another private equity investor - HgCapital. The exact price Hellman & Friedman paid is unknown, but a report in the Financial Times suggests it paid in the region of 200-300 million for Iris plus other assets.

The two companies will be combined and will trade under the Iris name.

Tesco has strengthened an existing IT outsourcing agreement with Xansa to the tune of 18 million so that it can continue to focus on its core retail business and customer satisfaction levels in addition to driving down costs.

The two companies have been working together for almost two decades and today's announcement further solidifies that relationship with a three-year contract extension focused on applications management.

Xansa will support a number of Tesco's critical technology functions, spanning distribution, payroll, pricing, products and stock replenishment, using its development expertise in Chennai, India and from five other sites based in the UK.

"Xansa, as a valued partner, provides us with expertise in applications management, an in depth understanding of our business and commitment to working together to deliver our key outcomes," said Mike McNamara, Tesco's UK IT director.

"We are therefore pleased to be extending our relationship with Xansa for a further three years."

Tesco is no stranger when it comes to IT innovation, among other things boasting great success with its popular Tesco.com brand and more recently with Tesco Direct.

And, just last week, the retail giant signed a deal with online registry MyThings to enable customers purchasing non-food items to add link their goods to a private portfolio where they can find out additional related information such as relevant accessories, downloads, insurance and warranties.

Tesco is also working on an ambitious global project with business software specialist Micro Focus to ensure IT best practice in its supply chain.

The aim is to use the new mainframe-like technology it its Izmir data centre - which powers eight hypermarkets in Turkey - later this year, before the company launches its brand in the US.

Supermarket giant Morrisons plans to invest 110 million over the next three years modernising its IT infrastructure to help it realise its strategic ambition of becoming "the food specialist for everyone."

The cash injection will go towards revamping core systems and moving from bespoke to packaged software and is part of a wider 450 million investment, the remainder of which will be directed towards revamping distribution and manufacturing processes as well as in-store activities.

The retailer also plans to introduce self-scanning check-outs in its stores later this year.

"Systems are fundamental to the efficient operation of any large retailer, and the Morrisons systems platforms have served the business well," said the company's chief executive Marc Bolland.

"They are now approaching the point of requiring to be changed. Most of the core systems in Morrisons have been developed in house, over many years, and some are up to 30 years old. We will be pursuing a three year programme of moving our trading, store, warehousing, distribution, payroll and financial systems on to new platforms, wherever possible using best of breed package software."

But, despite the grand plans, the supermarket chain doesn't intend to do anything too radical and is positioning the change as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary one.

"We believe the market for retail systems is well developed, and that there are relatively few areas where we need to continue with home grown applications," added Bolland.

"We will not be seeking to implement any 'leading edge' technology, as we believe our competitive advantages come in other areas, such as in-store service."