A recent survey by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales found the view that “small is beautiful”. Of all the accounting applications used in companies, Sage’s Instant Accounting package – which costs less than £100 – achieved the highest level of customer satisfaction.

The survey, of over 1,000 companies of all sizes and major vertical sectors, also found that accounting packages are viewed as having the potential to be the source of “business critical failure”, irrespective of whether a business chooses a cheap, simple package or a large, complex system.

In fact, 12% of respondents said that they had suffered a business critical failure of their system in the past two years. This included the low-cost packages like TAS Books, mid-range systems such as Exchequer Enterprise and Pegasus Opera and large enterprise systems such as Oracle Financials.