Sage News and Discussion

Sage issues full year financials - ""encouraging results"". It's tough to immediately spot anything major. The one area in North America that looks to be in trouble is Sage Payments. Not much detail but it appears they may have lost a major sales partner (and here I was thinking most sales came through cross sell to Sage customers). The wording on most of the report is fairly cautious in my view. They talk about R&D increases to their Invest products without mentioning the products themselves. Full PDF of the press release announcement: http://www.sage.com/~/media/group/files/investors/press-release-final.pdf http://www.sage.com/investors/regulatory-announcements/2014/12/03/final-results

Sage today issued full year 9/30/2014r audited results. The PDF with Sage narrative can be downloaded from: http://www.sage.com/~/media/group/files/investors/press-release-final.pdf It's difficult to interpret fully without a closer study of definitions. The growth is broken out by organic, statutory. For example, in the KPI section (last pages) Organic is defined as ""Organic revenue neutralises the impact of foreign exchange in prior year figures and excludes the contribution of current and prior year acquisitions, disposals and products held for sale. Unfortunately I've never been successful at uncovering exactly what products are ""held for sale"". In North America Sage Payments has a couple surprises: - Growth has slowed to 1% - Loss of major merchant acquirer in early 2014 R&D Spend: 62% = Invest 35% = Harvest 3% = Sunset Again, no idea (other than backroom chatter) on what products fall into Invest, Harvest, Sunset. If there's an official product specific list other than ""my Sage rep told me xxxx is Invest/Harvest/Sunset over breakfast"" -- I've never seen it. Sage ERP X3 Organic Revenue Growth - 7% (down from 12% in 2013) Sage One growth is tough to analyze as well. The Sage KPI table footnote indicates that several existing SaaS products from Germany, France and South Africa were re-categorized as being in the SageOne portfolio and that apparently made the Sage One number about 20,000 higher than it would have been. Sage have stated in the footnote to the KPI information that they've modified their definition of software subscription definition to be any contract where a customer may no longer use their software product if they cease to pay. As you may know in NA some products such as Sage 100 ERP have registration codes which continue to unlock the software even if the customer has stopped paying maintenance. I suspect that we will see a change to this eventually and registration codes may at some point be issued with an expiration date. It will be interesting to see if by issuing expiring registration keys to some North American products that Sage can produce a big uptick in subscription for NA and other areas.

So make sure you are keeping a record of all the license codes for all your customers...