2013 Innovation Award Nominee: Sage One

Sage One U.S., a web-based all-in-one application developed to address the unique business tracking and management needs of entrepreneurs and start-ups in the United States. Sage One was designed with a simple goal in mind: helping owners of aspiring businesses spend more time on innovation rather than administration.

Today’??s generation of emerging entrepreneurs are fully engaged with easy-to-use technology in nearly every aspect of their personal lives, but achieving similar efficiency with business applications can be challenging. In a recent Sage survey among businesses with 0 to 9 employees, 66 percent said they use three or more software applications to manage their day-to-day operations. This often can lead to wasted time, truncated workflow, redundant data entry and errors.

Sage One helps entrepreneurs alleviate common challenges such as redundant data entry and errors, disorganized record-keeping, and difficulty in sharing information by offering simple, yet essential, tools in a single, web-based application. Accessible from anywhere, Sage One allows users to easily share and manage their day-to-day operations without letting time-sensitive items fall through the cracks.

Online collaboration
Businesses that provide professional services, assign tasks to one or more people or send invoices to clients for work performed will benefit from many of the features in Sage One. The collaboration capabilities of Sage One can assist businesses with co-located or distributed teams of employees and contract workers -?? even clients -?? share and communicate, so no one works in isolation. Automatic notifications, reminders and tracking of in-progress or completed tasks keep everyone updated and simplify administration.

Accounting simplified
Sage One also simplifies and automates essential accounting by connecting business management functions. Less time is spent on data entry because information needs to be entered only once: a project becomes an invoice and then becomes a receipt. Users can rest easy knowing that all the accounting is being handled properly behind the scenes.

Payments integration
Sage One provides small businesses and entrepreneurs with another way to simplify their business with the integration of Sage Payment Solutions. The integration allows customers to pay their invoices online with a credit card, debit card, or PayPal account. The ability to accept payments online will significantly decrease the amount of time it takes for business owners to receive payments.

Living solution
Addressing the needs of entrepreneurs and start-ups has been the primary focus in the development of Sage One. Small business owners have been involved from the very beginning and their feedback has been instrumental in shaping the functionality and design of the newest Sage online offering.

One key feature of Sage One is that it will continue to evolve based on feedback from customers and partners. Ongoing improvements and new features will be introduced over time to support the growth needs of entrepreneurs and start-ups.

Click here to see an in-progress list of nominees for the 2013 Innovation Awards.