Sage (lack of) usability

(Cross-posted at blog.keepmebooked.com)

I have a few pet hates. One of them is how really, really hard it is to do anything in Sage (the market-leading accounting package in the UK). Years ago, at IfYouSki.com, I used Sage and swore never to use it again, because everything just took so long.

Then at ViaPost, I inherited a Sage system from my predecessor, but I figured, "Hey, nearly ten years have passed, probably Sage has got its act together now and the software will function less like something designed in in the mid 70s". But I figured wrong. It is still completely terrible to use, with even the most basic of tasks requiring a complex sequence of screens and clicks. And that's bad not just because it requires a lot of effort and brain-power to use, but because everything takes so much time. That's what usability is really about: letting you get stuff done quicker.

So rather than bore people to death on this in real life, I figured I'd bore people to death on YouTube instead. Here is me demonstrating how it takes several minutes of work in Sage just to find out why your phone spend was a little high last month. And, like, 5 seconds in Quickbooks.

(Warning, you have to have an really unhealthy interest in accounting software usability to get to the end. And noise-cancelling mic has given me a somewhat, ah, sultry-sounding voice, I don't sound like that in real life.)