Good afternoon, welcome to our Webinar on building the small business engine. I'm James Sandford, Head of Investor Relations here at Sage. Now in a moment, I'll hand over to our CEO, Steve Hare. Before I do, just a few housekeeping points. Firstly, please note that we will not be giving a trading update as part of the session, and no new material financial information will be provided. Secondly, after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. You can ask questions at any time by typing them into the questions and answers box on your viewing platform. We'll answer as many questions as we can today, and we'll take any remaining questions offline. I'd like to draw your attention to the important notice on slide two, and please note that this event is being recorded.
With that, I'll hand over to Steve.
That's great. Thanks very much, James. A very warm welcome to all of you. We're coming here to you live from our global HQ here in Newcastle. As many of you will know, this is our second such webinar since we refreshed our strategy last year. Really the purpose of these events is twofold. It's to provide you with deeper insights into our strategy, but also to give you some greater exposure to the depth and the capability of our leadership team. Now, as James said today, we're covering the small segment, but as you all know, you know, we're here to serve both small and mid-sized businesses.
Today we're gonna talk about small, both from a technology perspective, but also how we're just building that engine to serve those smaller customers. I think what we hope to leave you with is a real sense of the fact that we have made tremendous progress. We've made progress across all of our business areas, including medium. Today, we wanna really show you, give you those proof points of why it is that we've made so much progress in this area. The second thing that I want you all to take away from this is that it isn't just a case of offering a number of enhanced products, which we do have, but it's the curated experience.
It's the way that suite of products comes together to give a differentiated experience, both for accountants, but also for the end user of those products. I think the other thing as well is that we want to show you that we are both executing in the short term, so we're hitting those short-term milestones, but we are also very much running this for the long term. We wanna be able to show you that multi-year strategy. Now, I'd like to start by introducing the team. They'll talk individually as I hand over to them. I have with me today Neal Watkins. Neal runs our small segment globally, so is responsible not just for accounting, but accountants, HR, and payroll. We also have James Ashford.
James joined us when we acquired his business, GoProposal, which is a software business which is focused entirely on the accountant segment and helping accountants do their proposals and making proposals to their clients. Then also, Walid Abu-Hadba, who is our Chief Product Officer, who you've seen before in our previous webinar. I often start with this chart because I think it's important to come back and have the foundation around our strategic framework. Our purpose is as important as ever. This applies to customers, it applies to our internal ambitions. It applies to all of our stakeholders. We're here to knock down those barriers, so that everyone can thrive.
This really is our why, it's really the way we drive things internally, within Sage and how we seek to serve our customers. Our ambition is to be the trusted network for small and mid-size businesses. That ambition is about developing a combination of digital and human experiences. It's back to that suite. It's how we deliver to our customers. The technology, the products are incredibly important, but so is the service, so is the advice, so is the way that we support our small mid-size businesses. We continue to deliver through these five strategic priorities. Today, we're talking about build the small business engine, the third priority, but also a lot of what we will talk about today also impacts on the fourth priority, which is scaling the network.
Now, our stakeholders are always front of mind. We wanna deliver across all four of our stakeholders. Ultimately, by driving the strategy and scaling and growing the business, we're also at this point now where we're really focused on delivering that value for shareholders. Finally, it's underpinned by our values. It's very important that the way we go about executing is in accordance with our values. I just wanna say a little bit more about our ambition to be the trusted network for small, mid-sized businesses. Our digital network connects organizations with everyone that they need to connect with. So that provides online services that digitizes workflows to enable customers to run their businesses much more smoothly. Now, if you're not an accountant, it might be difficult to imagine how exciting it is to automate these workflows. If you are an accountant, you will understand it.
This network really will enable a transformation to take place in the way that small businesses and accountants are able to run their businesses. In simple terms, it enables the smooth flow of work and money across that network. Now, powering that digital network with data and using that data to drive innovation is also a key underlying objective. Neal will talk more about this, but it's also, you know, it's powered by artificial intelligence, it's powered by machine learning. The whole data set, the data flow is an integral part of what makes this so exciting. Now finally, just before I hand over to Neal, I just wanna say a quick word across these strategic priorities. Now, as I say, the key one today is the third one.
I do wanna just emphasize, and we'll obviously talk more about this in the year-end results, but each one of these five strategic priorities over the last 12 months, and as we look forward now over the next sort of 12 to 18 months, we have real momentum in each of these areas. Scaling the network in particular now is about increasing and accelerating that network effect through participation. A big part of how we increase participation and get that volume taking place through the network is obviously the small segment where we have the greatest volume of customers. With that, over to you, Neal.
Great. Thank you, Steve. It's my pleasure to lead the conversation now around building the small business engine. I'm gonna give you an overview of where our portfolio sits today. I wanna talk a little bit about some of the market trends we see that affect both Sage and our customers. I really wanna kinda click into our strategies for growth and really how that's gonna take what we deliver to the market to the next level. As Steve said, kinda my name's Neal Watkins. I lead our product teams across accounting, accountants, HR and payroll. As I go through the conversation on the small business engine, I really wanna bring to life why those product business units sit together and the power that they bring.
Let me start by really leading out on what is our small business proposition and our portfolio. It's really built around kind of three different suites, three different franchises that we deliver to the market. It starts on the right-hand side, really focused on our crown jewels in Sage for the small business, our Sage 50 franchise. This is really focused on the professional user in business, professional user in practice across both financial record keeping, accounting, compliance, and payroll. In the middle, you can see our brand new suite, Sage for Accountants, where we've really moved from capture to compliance, with the accountants serving the accounting needs of their clients, all the way across to proposal to advisory, serving the end-to-end practice needs so the accountant can better serve their clients.
This is really underpins with some of our acquisitions of GoProposal, AutoEntry and Futrli, and is built out with some of our organic developments. On the left-hand side, you can see our Small Business Suite, really designed for the needs of a business owner from financial record keeping all the way through to managing their employees. I think in the past, we've spoken a lot about cloud native and cloud connected, but what you really see here is the lines start to blur. We've been really focused on trying to develop and deliver the right interface for the right job for the right customer. That means if you're an accountant and you're out on the road and you're meeting a prospect in a coffee shop, you should be able to pull up a tablet, create a proposal, and send it in real time.
If you're a business owner and you wanna see the last 12 months of trading, and you wanna see a 12-month cash flow forecast, you might want a 29-inch screen, a lot of detail. You might wanna use a desktop application. As we bring our propositions together, we put the data into the digital network, we create a single end-to-end experience using the Sage design language, we really blur the lines between cloud native and cloud connected. We have an unrivaled breadth of products. It's not just the products that are really important here. We are best in class. It's not just our customers, it's accountants, it's the market. We are the trusted source for information.
I think we've seen that with our MTD hub for Making Tax Digital too, one of the most visited places for information to really help unpack some of the requirements and guidelines for Making Tax Digital. As Steve said, we're building curated experiences for small businesses and accountants that expands and grows as they need. This portfolio for Sage represents about 50% of Sage's global revenue, and it's really where we're driving much of our investments around the Small Business Suite. It's not just about our products, though. I just wanna take a moment to talk about our go-to-market execution. Over the last few years, the investments we've made in digital marketing have really fired up our digital marketing engine. We've gone from 50% acquisition of customers directly on digital channels all the way through to 90% today.
This creates a brand new momentum for us over the last few years that we're really starting to build upon. We know it's not just about serving customers directly. Accountants are critical to our future success. Since we launched Sage for Accountants back in the end of November, we've had 2,000 new practices sign up for our brand-new proposition, and they have the ability now to leverage from proposal all the way to advisory. The products, the propositions, can't stand on their own. We continue to be cited as best-in-class for kind of service, expertise, and advice, and we're really proud to have a 4.6 rating with Trustpilot with over 15,000 reviews. We're not standing on our laurels. We're really excited that we launched Sage Membership. We really start to humanize advice and content.
We create content for the customers and the accountants we serve, and then we deliver it to market through the communities that we build out. It's not just the products, it's also the go-to-market. Now let's take a moment to consider some of the market trends that impact all of us. The first one is really around the digitization of tax, and what this does is really drives kinda digital record-keeping for small business owners. Whether you're a sole trader, a landlord, a partnership, whether you're a corporate, you now need to keep very regular digital records. It means that you can keep on top of your admin, and you can have visibility of your business and any future liabilities in real time. We're also seeing the market expand through to fintechs, and we're starting to see accounting and compliance embedded in new product propositions.
This means that we can start to serve businesses and prospects that we've never served before, open up our addressable market, and starting to make accounting and compliance invisible to those smaller businesses. When we drive investments, we make sure we invest in the platforms we build, so we can deliver the microservices underneath across multiple apps and multiple channels. As we do that allows us to be very composable, and this really just means be modular, be able to create microservices that can be tailored to the needs of a business as those needs expand and grow. As those needs expand and grow, what those businesses find out is they have to embrace a new world of working. Distributed workforce is where we have people working anytime, any place, anywhere.
Either from this live broadcast in Newcastle or from a coffee shop kind of the other side of the world, I can be presenting this to you. That means we need a whole new mechanism of engagement that is really digitally driven. We have to embrace a new way of working. We also have to think about the future, and this is really about where we have to think about the sustainability of what we do and the social impact we have, not just for us as a large organization, but for all of the accountants and small businesses we serve. This also changes the dynamics of how we do accounting. What do we account for in the future? Financial records? Products in an inventory? Do we account for the carbon impact that we have on society?
Now it's very much about seeing accounting much broader than what we have today. If we click through, though, let's listen to some of the small businesses that we serve in the U.K. This is from our Digital Britain report of about 5,000 businesses from April this year. What we heard from those small businesses is really about the current environment they're operating in, and very consistent that many of you already heard around inflation, the cost of living, labor shortages. There are challenges for everyone. What we heard loud and clear, though, is those best small businesses are really investing and embracing in technology, not just for resiliency, but also for growth. These local businesses that serve their communities are now going global. They're digitizing their businesses.
They're breaking down barriers and boundaries, and they're starting to deliver products and services in places like never before. As they digitize their business, they then start to digitize different parts of their workflow, and the key areas for investment really focus around accounting, HR, and payroll. What does this mean for Sage? What is our strategy for growth? Five core priority areas that we're focused on. On the left-hand side, it's really about the accountant. Not only how do we support the accountant serving their clients directly with accounting, but how do we support their end-to-end workflow, from their ability to serve a prospect, all the way through to manage a business relationship and give business advice. Those clients are critical to us as well, so we've really launched a Small Business Suite to support those businesses as they scale and grow.
I'm gonna talk a little bit about what that means. We're also ready to serve some of the smaller businesses out in the market, ready for Making Tax Digital, too, with Income Tax Self-Assessment, and really ready to serve those new needs of those smaller businesses. We will absolutely, though, not forget our heritage, which is really being the gold standard for accounting. Built on the Sage 50 franchises from the past decades, we were best in class then, we're best in class now, and we absolutely will be in the future. We're also taking this way beyond just financial records, accounting, and compliance, and really taking payroll and HR to the next level, all the way through to the employee. All of these applications are underpinned by the power of the digital network.
If you imagine all of the data coming together in a single platform, that then allows us to solve new problems that exist in the market with brand-new offerings, and that's really part of our future. I'd like us to drill into the first one with accountant practice growth. I'm really delighted to introduce our great colleague, James Ashford. James recently joined from GoProposal. James is our entrepreneur in residence. He's our chief evangelist, and he knows everything about accountants. James, over to you.
Thanks, Neal. Hi, my name is James Ashford. I'm the founder of GoProposal, and prior to setting that business up, I did many things from studying product design to being a close-up magician and setting up art courses in prisons. I always had this deep passion to set up my own business and to be an entrepreneur, because as a child, I would see these business owners lead, leading these interesting lives, and I wanted to be part of that. I attempted many businesses myself. Not many of them got off the ground with any great success until I finally set up a marketing agency which got some traction. It was a nice business. We served our clients to a high level. Ultimately, that business failed. It failed because we failed to invest fully into the finance function of that business.
I was making decisions based on 18-month-old data, and each of those decisions took us one degree off course until one day I realized we're at the edge, and we weren't able to pull out of that. We weren't also given everything that we needed by our accountant. It was my first business. I wasn't aware of exactly what I needed, and so we had to go through the pain of that. After that, I invested heavily into my understanding of businesses and what makes businesses really successful. I studied it, worked with some great mentors, read everything I could on it, and as I started to put these strategies and ideas into practice into different businesses, one of the key things I realized that was the core problem of many of them was the way they priced and sold their services.
If they could just price consistently, if they could price more profitably, if they could charge for everything that they were doing, if they could empower their entire team to sell their services, if they could convert at a higher rate, if they could just get their money in quicker, they'd become more profitable businesses, and that would solve a lot of the other problems that they were facing as well. I was able to do this with great success in businesses of various sizes across a range of industries, until one day I met an accountant in Manchester, and I said, "I can help you with this." He said, "We're good. We've got this sorted out. We're better than all the other accountancy firms out there at doing this." I said, "That's fair enough, but with respect, I'm not comparing to those other accountancy firms.
As a client, I'm comparing to the likes of Amazon or Uber. I want this world-class experience, and I can help you to achieve that." We implemented some software and strategies into that business. Other accountancy firms heard about it, and that was the start of GoProposal. GoProposal enables accounting businesses to price consistently, to sell more confidently, and to minimize risk with every single client engagement. The reason why this became such a passionate project for me is 'cause not only did I wanna help accountants to grow profitable, thriving businesses themselves, but I also wanted to help them to serve their clients to higher levels, to ensure they were doing everything they possibly could for their clients, to install the full finance function for them, to help those small, medium-sized businesses to avoid the pitfalls that caught me off guard.
We grew that business with no investment. We're an unusual start-up software business in that we were profitable quite early on, and we maintained that profitability 'cause we wanted to maintain the growth of that business. We got it to about a GBP 1.5 million revenue. We had over 1,000 clients using the product around the world. Our main area was the U.K., but it got to a point where we knew it was right to find an acquirer. We didn't have to sell. We didn't have a burning runway or anything, which put us in this privileged position of being able to choose the absolute right acquirer for us, that was right for my team, that was right for the product, that was right for our clients to be able to make the decision. Sage was that company.
They had the closest proximity to our market, the deepest understanding, certainly, of the U.K. market. Their heritage meant that they understood accountants better than any other company out there, and they were committed to serving accountants. Not just using them as a marketing channel, but to really help them and support them to grow profitable, successful, thriving accounting businesses. They're seen as the leading educators in this space that accountants would go to when there's any changes in legislation, and it really lent itself to what we were looking for. They were also very closely aligned with our values, and their trajectory of where they were going with their digital network and bringing in real-time data aligned with exactly where we were heading with GoProposal as well. Once we were acquired, we became rapidly integrated.
They really helped us and incubated us, thanks to Neal and the team. It was very humbling that they wanted to learn from us and all of the good things that we were doing, so they could bring that back into Sage as well. We've grown very strongly since that acquisition, both in terms of growing our market share, but also in terms of our team. When we sold to Sage, we had 12 members of staff. Now we've got 30 members of staff and an actual dev squad, so we can build out products and features and everything we've always wanted to, which has led us to launching two new products off the back of this, which is our own engagement letter product called OverSuite, and more recently, an AML product, anti-money laundering product, which has really hit the market with great success as well.
We're helping Sage to become a competitive differentiator, because what's happening now, I get to speak to lots of firms very closely. Just this last week, I've been sat with CEOs of firms up and down the country, so I get to really understand what's going on. The message that I'm getting back, even from firms who perhaps use competitive products to Sage, are saying, "Well, look, we now use GoProposal by Sage. We use AutoEntry by Sage. We use Futrli by Sage. We've seen what you're doing at events. We've seen what you're doing in the marketplace. We'd be foolish now not to be seriously considering Sage and offering it to our customers as well." Just a few weeks ago, I was speaking to a firm, one of the most progressive firms in the U.K. They were the first to be fully cloud adopted.
They're award-winning firm, and they have an aggressive growth strategy of buying up other accountancy, businesses as well. Again, they use a competitive product to Sage with the exception of the latest firm they've just bought. With this latest firm, they have moved them all over to Sage. We're turning heads, and it's really exciting to be a part of that and to feel that we're contributing to that as well. Like I say, I get to speak to lots of accountancy firm owners. Just on the way up here today, I was speaking to the CEO of a top 30 firm. I get to hear what their real concerns are, what the real challenges are that they're facing.
Many of them are struggling to price with confidence to be able to raise their fees, especially with the turbulent times that we face at the moment, with rising energy prices and with a looming recession on the horizon. They lack that confidence to grow their fees, and we're helping them and supporting them to do that. They're finding it hard to recruit good staff. I was with a top 100 firm last night at an event speaking to their clients, and he was telling me they were just at a point that they're trying to recruit an accountant, not too senior level, but he's interviewing them. He'd interviewed 14 firms in the last few weeks, and he'd narrowed it down to four firms that he was considering to work with. The market's changed for attracting good staff.
If these firms can't pay high wage salaries to these members of staff, if they can't provide space where they can flourish, if they can't give them the systems and the technology to work remotely and to work flexibly, if they can't give them the space and the training to grow and to flourish and to become the best they can be, they're gonna really struggle. Firms also have complex workflows, but they still have disconnected products. They've invested in digital cloud software, but they've not got fully digitized cloud solutions like the digital network offers in terms of giving them real-time data so they can make the decisions they need to make. Finally, MTD is changing the way they're gonna have to charge and deliver their service. This is gonna be hugely disruptive to the accounting industry over the next 18-24 months.
I went and visited a firm. Steve, you visited the same firm as well on the east coast in the U.K., and they're a small to medium-sized firm doing great things, fully using Sage, fully using GoProposal and the rest of the products as well, and they bought five other firms in the last 12 months who are not either capable or prepared to make the changes required for what's coming their way. We're arming these firms with everything they need, so they can grow through this period, but not only go through it but grow through it. We don't just want to help them to survive what's coming. We wanna help them to thrive. That's why I'm so excited that GoProposal is now a key part of Sage for Accountants, because Sage for Accountants does exactly that.
It's a unique proposition for accountants, helping them to go from proposal through to advisory. It helps them to win and onboard more profitable clients, as well as maximizing the profitability of all of the clients they already have. It enables them to manage their clients effortlessly all in one place. It helps them to get their bookkeeping and tax work done for their clients in real time with all of the data they need. This underpins all of the rest of the value they can provide to their clients, which is in terms of giving advice with confidence to them, but also offering a deeper level of service, a more human level of service, where they can really impact these small, medium-sized businesses and the lives of the people behind those businesses as well. Finally, this is not just about software.
This is about really thinking about how we can support this industry, which is where the membership really comes in with the support and rewards as the practice grows. Not just the software, but giving the clients and the accountants all of the education they need, giving them the communities and the peer-to-peer support. I'm gonna take you now into a brief demo that's gonna really bring Sage for Accountants to life.
This demo of Sage for Accountants will show how this solution enables the entire end-to-end workflow for a practice from proposal to advisory. First, Liz Clark, our accountant, logs in to Sage for Accountants using her Sage ID. This takes her into the main client list in Client Management, and from here, she can navigate to the Prospects tab so that she can create a new prospect record. First, Liz selects whether the prospects in question is an organization or an individual, types the prospect name, and continues to the next stage, which is selecting the type of business. This dynamically informs which fields are displayed next, ensuring that Liz can enter relevant information into the record. Once the prospect has been created, Liz can access the proposal functionality in order to create a professional proposal in a few simple steps.
The pricing matrix enables Liz to eliminate scope creep by ensuring that she's pricing correctly and competitively for the services being offered from the outset. Here, Liz is ensuring that the right services have been selected for the client. A pre-prepared library of customized proposals enables Liz to match her practice brand to create and send documentation to her prospect really easily. Pressing Send ensures that the proposal is emailed instantly to the prospect. The prospect is able to accept the proposal digitally, and when this is done, Liz will see this change immediately within Sage for Accountants. A new notification also appears informing Liz that Sutton Landscaping Limited has accepted her firm's proposal. Behind the scenes, we've automatically converted the prospect to a client and moved it into the client list. Let's jump into the new client record.
The Overview tab is displayed, showing the client details, any key relationships, all products connected, and the latest comments. She can easily navigate through the tabs to reach key information. For example, managing products, editing key client information on the Client Details tab, adding time and date-stamped comments for herself or colleagues within the Comments tab. The Obligations tab presents Liz with a clear view of all the accounts and tax obligations for Sutton Landscaping Limited, and the GoProposal tab allows her to consult and amend any proposal, pricing, or engagement information currently in place with the client. Finally, the Futrli tab presents the client's live connected accounting data, turning it instantly into a powerful tool with which to spot challenges and opportunities. Liz has one source of truth for her clients in Sage for Accountants and can manage the practice's entire end-to-end workflow.
Hopefully that demo really brought to life the power of Sage for Accountants, really showing how easy it is for an accountant to actually add a prospect, send a proposal, win the client, automatically set up the subscriptions, and from there, invest time providing advisory services, looking at the cash flow forecast. Let's move on to the second focus area now. As we move into the second area, it's really about how do we then take that relationship with that business owner and that client to the next level? This is where we've created the Small Business Suite. What I'd like to do, though, is really highlight some of the problems we're trying to address with the Small Business Suite end-to-end. I'd like to start with a quote, and this is a quote from one of our customers, Stuart Simons.
He's the CEO and business owner of Groom Dog City. Stuart says, "Sometimes in business it's like you can't move your legs fast enough," which I expect we've all experienced. "It's literally like you're in a load of honey." For me, it feels like a load of mud. You can see the pressure business owners are under, having to work evenings, weekends, trying to keep up on admin, trying to price work, win work, deliver work, get paid for work, and then be compliant. What we've tried to do for our customers is really break it down in these simple jobs to be done. It all starts with helping small businesses get customers and get paid. This is really where businesses get created. This is what business owners are so passionate about, like running and delivering the business around the idea they had.
Once they master that, though, what they need to quickly do is get organized, stay on top of product service delivery, really understand their financials, organize their business in a way that they can actually meet both their customer and their legal obligations. This is really where it's really important to get both tax and compliance right. As they do all this, though, the magic really comes that they can get visibility of their business, enabling better decision-making, looking at a future forecast, understanding what products and services they need, what client wins are on the horizon, what additional staff they might need. It's also then really important that they get payroll right, and here it's not just about payroll and compliance, but also about managing the life cycle of that entire team. It goes from recruitment all the way to retirement.
What we try to do at Sage is make sure that that's complemented with the best expertise and advice throughout the end-to-end life cycle. What is it we've created? We've created a complete Small Business Suite. It connects the business together from the front of product or service delivery, all the way through to the back in terms of financial administration, record keeping, payroll, HR services. We've created streamlined workflows, a frictionless experience using the same look and feel, and this has really enabled us to deliver integrated insights for better decision-making that support business growth with a Small Business Suite that grows with the customer. One of our key differentiators, though, is we've really wanted to do this in collaboration with accountants and making sure the accountant can also serve those clients, which is really key for us.
Let's take a look at what this means kind of commercially as that business expands. We have a small business on the left just being established. They want to manage their accounts, their financials, their compliance. They start on our standard accounting product. They experience success. Their business is building. They add employees. They scale up to, let's say, 10. They now wanna get payroll right. They wanna manage their staff. But this is an important inflection point. They're now starting to diversify. They're adding products to services, and they're starting to sell cross-border multi-currency. They've moved up to Accounting Plus. They've moved to Payroll 25, which basically means that they have 25 employees because they now need more staff to manage the product, the product inventory, and delivery across a broader geography.
At this point, they know that their employees are key, and really managing that life cycle from recruitment to retirement means that they add in Sage HR. What you can see over this timeline is from being established to scaling, Sage have everything you need. We have a complete Small Business Suite that grows with the business as the business grows. Very similar to Sage for Accountants, as we grow with the accountant, we've created the same for the small business owner. It's not just about growing businesses. We also need to take care of those smaller businesses, especially with tax and compliance. As we mentioned in the mega trends earlier, the macro trends, Making Tax Digital in the U.K. and Europe is really changing the landscape for how tax is done.
It's all about keeping records, doing regular submissions, and really being aware of your liabilities. What we've created with Sage Accounting is really Sage Accounting for self-employed, and this really enables MTD compliance. We take the core of what we've always done, which is help businesses win customers, get paid, ensure that they can deliver the right tax and compliance. What we've done differently, though, is we've really simplified the ability to keep digital records, and we've done it in a way where the business and the accountant can easily categorize them, ready for a quarterly submission. We've also focused on collaboration, accountant to client to accountant.
What we know of the 3.9 million taxpayers that come under MTD for ITSA, we believe from our surveys, 81% will engage with accountant at some point in the workflow, and typically that workflow is the final declaration when you're bringing all of the sources of data together. The way we do that is by actually delivering a solution that's HMRC authorized. It's recognized already. It's in the market today. This really enables us to serve the growing needs and the changing compliance needs of some of the small businesses all the way up to small to medium businesses. Let's take a look at a demo. The demo is gonna show a brief introduction of how Sage Accounting works for the small business owner and the sole trader.
This demo will take you through the journey of how an accountant engages with our MTD for ITSA pilot for a self-employed client business. In Sage for Accountants, Liz Clark adds a new client record. SH Energy Services is a sole trader client with non-complex requirements. Once the client record has been added, Liz navigates to the product tab and adds the Accounting Self-Assessment product. From the products tab, Liz can directly subscribe to Sage products as well as connecting to products that are not billed directly through Sage. She selects Accounting Self-Assessment, then subscribes to the product. The new product provisions in a few seconds and is available for her to access from the client record or the client list. She invites her client to collaborate using the Invite Client feature. Let's now switch to the client, Alex at SH Energy Services.
Alex receives the email invitation in his inbox and selects Start Using Accounting Self-Assessment. He sets up his Sage ID to access the product and jumps straight in. From here, Alex can connect his bank feed so that he can start importing live transactions straight away. Connecting a feed is as easy as logging into online banking. It's also easy to record money in and money out using the cash book feature, ensuring that everything is categorized correctly. Next, Alex heads over to the taxes area to set up his connection with HMRC. He enters his National Insurance number and his Government Gateway credentials to establish the live link. Once connected, Alex can track his tax liability and check and submit his first quarterly update to HMRC. Once the submission has been successful, Alex will be notified immediately, giving him peace of mind and reassurance.
Let's now check back in with Liz, Alex's accountant. Liz can readily see any obligation alerts directly from the client list, and she has some for Alex and for his business. She can jump into the same client data to prepare the final declaration. Once Liz is happy and has reviewed the data contained in this declaration, she will tick the box and submit the information to HMRC. One single source of truth for the accountant and for the client.
The demonstration shows just how easy it is for an accountant to add a new client, for the client to add their bank feeds, to categorize their transactions, and for the two of them to collaborate on the final declaration. It's really key that we have this accountant-to-client relationship, and we build this through our product propositions. We also know, though, that not all clients are gonna start with an accountant, and maybe not all clients will start with accounting. Think of a small business at the point of it just being an idea. What does that individual do? They go and form a business. They create a business bank account. Well, everything we've shown you and demonstrated you so far is built on a set of microservices, a set of technology that can be plugged into different applications and delivered through different channels.
I'm really excited to be able to partner with Tide, to actually deliver accounting and compliance as a service which really delivers Tide Accounting. Under the covers, this is the same capabilities that you see in the Sage Accounting products. What we've done is taken those microservices and really plugged it into the front-end experience of Tide. This means that we can really serve their membership base, a very large growing membership base, and there may be members that aren't actually ready to buy accounting or make an accounting decision. It means that we can take our products and services to the needs of those businesses at that point in time, and we can start to make accounting more invisible, focused on payments in, payments out, categorization, and then tax submissions. Now, think of the power of all of that data in the digital network.
We now have the ability to use the data to create new product offerings, leveraging all of the intelligence that we amass of all of those customers for all of our partnerships. We're really excited with the strategic partnership with Tide. I also just wanna say, though, it's not just about small businesses and strategic partnerships. It's about the partnerships that we established 40 years ago when we really built kind of Sage, we built Sage 50, and we were, we are, and we will be the gold standard for accounting for the professional user. What we're doing, though, is trying to build on that heritage and take it to the next level. We're trying to create and make those professional user capabilities consumable by all, whether an accountant or a business owner.
As we develop capabilities once, we allow them to be delivered through multiple applications and channels. The way we do that with Sage 50 and Sage Accounting is we start to unify the customer experience. We complement those products with cloud-based services, even new services we build ourselves, or acquisitions like GoProposal and Futrli and AutoEntry, which we then use to drive automation of workflow, continuing to make sure those services are compliant and actually showing them in a brand-new front-end interface, whether it's in Sage for Accountants or in My Sage. All of that data and intelligence then fuels the digital network. Sage 50 is already creating smart invoices that go into the digital network that really then allow us to create new propositions and new ways to drive automation.
Let's take kind of a pause to look at a demo of Sage 50 within Sage for Accountants and really see the power of Sage 50 data in the cloud.
Sage for Accountants can be one source of truth for all the clients the practice works with. In this demo, we'll show how accountants can manage their Sage 50 clients via Sage for Accountants. Liz logs into Sage for Accountants and into her client list. She accesses Jordan's Warehouse, a client using Sage 50 to manage their books. The client record overview shows the main detail, including a monthly forecast, presented via the integration between the client's Sage 50 data and Futrli. In this visual, we can see the power of Sage's entity service, enabling Liz to connect and manage all of these relationships for her clients, bringing our digital network to life. Back in the client record, Liz navigates to the Products tile, where she can access the profit and loss report powered by Sage 50 in a single click.
She then uses Smart Reporting capability to customize and filter the report before rerunning it with live data and then emailing it out to one of her team. Liz has also connected this client to AutoEntry so that she can automate the flow of data into Sage 50, making bookkeeping processes easier and ensuring less rekeying of data. Back in the client record, the VAT overview tab holds detailed information relating to MTD for that. Liz acts as the agent for this client, so she's able to access all of their payments, liability, and submission information surfaced via a direct connection with HMRC. The Obligations tab presents Liz with a clear view of all of the accounts and tax obligations for Jordan's Warehouse. The GoProposal tab allows her to consult and amend any proposal, pricing, or engagement information currently in place with this client.
With Futrli, this tab surfaces the client's live, connected Sage 50 data, turning it instantly into a powerful tool with which to spot challenges and opportunities. Finally, Liz heads over into the business account for her practice via the global navigation toolbar, where she's able to track her Sage Points total for the practice and understand how to reach the next discount tier. She can keep a handle on any volume purchase agreements and Sage Points history at a glance. Sage for Accountants truly enables Liz and her colleagues to manage their day-to-day and run an efficient and profitable practice.
You've just seen the power of Sage 50 data in the cloud. We've made it so easy for an accountant to both access the data, to run a report, the same reporting capabilities that we've built in our cloud accounting product. They right-click, generate a P&L without even leaving the interface. Complete single sign-on and no need to open another application unless they wanna do more advanced tasks. You also saw the power of AutoEntry, where you can digitize an invoice, capture it straight into Sage 50, part of the same dataset. Then finally, the power of Futrli, a cash flow forecast based off of the same Sage 50 data. We've wrapped this up all with kind of those capabilities together in a single product interface. We wanna take it further. It's not just about accounting.
We wanna take it beyond financials and really extend to payroll and HR. I said earlier, kind of this has moved way beyond just payroll and payroll compliance. This is now about ensuring that we can meet the evolving needs of the new way of work. This really starts with recruitment all the way through to retirement, going through the life cycle of onboarding, of performance management, time and attendance, and really engaging staff. What we've also done though, is we've taken some of that data, and we've used that data to really empower the employee with their own financial well-being.
I'm really excited now to show you a demonstration of our cloud payroll product that leverages Sage HR from our Small Business Suite that allows an employee to access their payslip online, and then with our strategic partner, Experian, really enables employment verification, which fast-tracks the application for credit, in this case, I believe it was a mortgage, to really then streamline that process. No more paper records, no more photocopying and scanning. You just click a button, you give consent, and then the data accelerates the process. Let's take a look.
In this demo, we'll see Sage's payroll and HR products and what they can offer for employer and employee. Ramona Riches is the director of Cobalt Systems. As employer, she can easily review the payroll summary on one screen, and when she's ready, process the payroll for April. It's easy to see previous pay runs here, as well as triggering the next. First, she confirms the day on which she'd like her employees to be paid. Ramona has three employees, Chris, Anne-Marie, and Richard. She reviews the sickness absence for Chris and then selects Next to work on his payslip. This month, she's giving Chris a bonus of GBP 500, which she can do simply by selecting Add Payment. PAYE national insurance and pensions deductions are automatically calculated as figures are entered. On the payroll summary, she can see exactly how much this pay run is going to cost.
She then simply confirms the pay values. Clicking Save sends the full payroll submission directly to HMRC. The completed pay run screen shows when the submission has been successfully sent and also shows when online payslips are available. Sage Payroll and HR are connected to the Sage Network, which means we can model relationships between entities in the network, sharing data to enable new powerful functionality, as we'll demonstrate. In this example, Chris, our employee, can use a mobile app to connect directly to his payslip information. Here, Chris has downloaded the app and logs in. He's met with a notification that takes him to a summary of his payslips over recent months. He can drill in to inspect the pay calculation in detail. Returning to the homepage, Chris can use additional functionality to request some time off.
He sees a simple calendar view, selects the relevant dates, and submits the request to his manager. When it's approved, he'll be notified directly through the mobile app. Later, perhaps Chris might decide to apply for a mortgage. Logging into the app and into the My Profile area, Chris can switch on employment and income verification, which allows trusted third parties to verify his income. Here, Chris is applying for a mortgage with Millennium Trust. He enters his details, and by connecting through Experian, he's able to verify his employment and salary details to support this mortgage application. His verification is complete, and the lender is ready to provide the mortgage, all achieved through the power of the Sage digital network. Chris is in full control of his data and can see the history of requests for verification.
Through the Sage digital network, Sage provides services for HR and payroll for both the employer and the employee.
The demo just showed how we get the network effect. In the past, you would have imagined we're delivering payroll services to businesses to their employees. Now we're going beyond that. We're delivering services to those businesses for their employees, and now we're delivering employee services, all powered by the digital network. Hopefully, those four demos have really brought to life how product innovation in Sage and delivery is really accelerating. For our accountants, we have a unique proposition from proposal all the way to advisory, serving the end-to-end needs of the practice. For their clients, we have a Small Business Suite that grows as their needs grow with the same experience end to end that grows as their business adds staff, and they have new requirements.
We're already ready for Making Tax Digital, too, to address the needs of the 3.9 million individuals that come under self-assessment. We're absolutely gonna continue to be the gold standard for accounting, serving the professional user both in business and in practice. We're gonna take that much further, unlocking these new opportunities that we just showed to you around payroll, HR, and then employee services. All of this is underpinned and powered by the Sage Network. As we bring our datasets together, as we understand relationships, we can start to build and deliver new product offerings, serving new business needs. If there's only three things that you're gonna take away from today, then now is the time to grab a pen and paper or a digital notepad, and these are the three things I want you to take away.
Number one, Sage is gonna win with accountants. We have the strategy, we have the products in place, and we are already delivering. The momentum is building. We have an unrivaled Small Business Suite, which when complemented with our service and then our membership offerings, is second to none. Thirdly, we've already fired up the go-to-market engine over the last few years. The flywheel's moving. We're now adding in more products. We're expanding across geos, and we expect to see that momentum build. It's been my pleasure to share with you this conversation. Hopefully we can get some great questions. With that, I'm gonna hand over to James Sandford to lead the Q&A.
Many thanks, Neal. Also thanks to James. I hope this has given you a good insight into how we are building the small business engine. What we're gonna do now is turn to the Q&A session. Thanks very much for the questions that you've submitted so far. You can still ask questions, if you haven't done so already. Please just type them into the questions and answers box in the viewing platform, and we'll come to your question, as quickly as we can. Let's get started. The first question is a question on Sage 50, and the question is: Can you explain in more detail the future strategy for Sage 50, and whether we will see a cloud-native version?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think hopefully what I showed you is kind of the difference between cloud-connected and cloud-native goes away, and it really becomes about having the right user interface for the right job. We absolutely believe there's definitely a place for a desktop application, for a web application, and mobile. What's really important is we have all of the data connected together in the digital network. We will absolutely continue to deliver cloud services both as new product features, like you saw with Smart Reporting, with Sage 50 data, but also then adding in capabilities like cash flow forecasting with Futrli, or AutoEntry with the digitization of invoices and receipts. We think the lines are really blurring between cloud-connected and cloud-native, and Sage 50 is really at the heart of that.
Great. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Neal.
Sure. Absolutely.
Yeah, cool. Thanks, yeah.
Let me add a couple things here. We get this question a lot, and I really love this question. Sage 50 is absolutely a core component of our product strategy, and it's not gonna go away. It's never gonna go away as long as I'm here and we are all here. It is a fantastic product. It is intended for its purpose. If you need a powerful, you know, desktop application, we're gonna have them there. Just remember that almost 50% of all the new capabilities that we lit up in the last 12 months for Sage 50 came through the cloud. Think of it as more or less like a Microsoft Office.
If you're Excel is really a desktop application, but all the new features of Excel, all the capabilities of Excel, all the capabilities of Microsoft Office are coming through the cloud, and that's how we look at it. It's our suite. Literally, it's our suite, it's our Office equivalent, analogy for that.
Great. Thanks very much, Walid. Changing tack a little bit. We've had a question on kind of competitive positioning. There is an investor perception that you've ceded ground to Xero with accountants. Where do you think functionality or go-to-market gaps still exist versus Xero?
I think with accountants, what we've done, hopefully you've seen from the presentation, is we've changed it from being just about accounting to actually being about the accountant themselves, the end-to-end workflow for the practice. We really see our differentiation supporting the accountant running their business, capturing new clients, so really prospects and proposals, and then delivering accounting, payroll, and compliance services. We believe through having a proposal to advisory capability, we can automate much of the workflow in the middle that then allows the accountant to invest more time with business relationships with their clients, understanding their business to have business insights, and then using products like Futrli to deliver kinda cash flow forecasts and future projections. We've actually changed the conversation, the landscape with accountants. It's no longer just about accounting.
The other thing to add to that is if you look at what's happening with fintechs and embedded finance and some parts of basic accounting becoming invisible, like, we will be serving those needs through strategic partners, but we've got a curated experience for the accountants where we've managed them all holistically.
Can I add to that as well, Mark? It's absolutely correct. We're changing the product composition to really win. The accountants wanna add more business, and they wanna be more efficient in processing the business, and the product is all about that. Our competitors, Admit it, they did a fairly decent job with accountants and evangelizing to accountants. That's a muscle right now we are kicking off. With James, as you've seen today, we're re-emphasizing and re-engaging our evangelism muscle to accountants. Accountants are a very important channel for us. They are a really critical element in there. We're engaging with them at multiple levels. Starts with the product, but then we have customer service, we have business services, and in the future, without announcing anything right now, we will be providing more microservices to accountants to grow their business and become more efficient.
Things like accounts payable, things like, you know, accounts receivable on behalf of their customers. That's another element that we allow the accountants. We are gonna win with the accountants, and we're gonna win them back, but we're gonna win them back by providing them a great set of services to grow their business. That's the way we do it, and through great evangelism and understanding their pain points and taking that away.
I think that's right. I think the two things that I just wanna emphasize have changed is 'Cause we, you know, we would recognize
If you go back, you know, four or five years, you know, we didn't focus in the way that we should have on accountants. We are, over the last few years, we have really changed that. We're focused, you know, not just on the end clients, or the end clients are very, very important, the end users of the software are very important, but we're also focused on the accountants and how the accountants run their own business. You can see that by the fact that we've acquired GoProposal, we've acquired Futrli. We are making acquisitions which are focused purely on accountants.
I think the other point I'd really emphasize is compared to our competitors, not only do we have an unrivaled suite, including the advice and support we give, we have a deeper and broader understanding of accountants and the accountant space and accounting in terms of workflows, products, et cetera. It is unrivaled. I think what you're seeing now from Sage is us really leveraging that expertise and that capability and really engaging and making a huge difference. Accountants, even accountants that don't use our products, are engaging with us and listening to us. James can speak, you know, has already spoken from personal experience. He has many clients of GoProposal who don't use our accounting products, but they are now engaging with us, and they want to understand how Sage has changed, and we have changed a lot.
Yeah. If I can just add as well. Was the question that we're conceding ground to accountants? Is that what the question is?
There was a perception that we have.
That isn't actually the case. Like Steve said, it might have been historically, but the tide has already turned. These are not like promises of what's gonna happen in the future. The tide has already turned. I'm already speaking to these firms who perhaps were once agnostic with those solutions. That is not the way now, and they're looking to Sage and using our products. Especially if you look at, like, recent events that we've done, Accountex and the buzz that we created off the back of that, we were the dominant force there. I think what's really starting to shine through and what people are really understanding now, as Steve said, is our commitment to the space.
Yeah.
Our commitment. These are not a marketing channel. We're not trying to befriend them to then reach around and grab their clients. We're genuinely serving them. Like, we are the leading force in education for accountants as well.
Great. Thank you very much. Staying on a similar theme, can you give us any metrics on the accounting channel or anything more kind of tangible to back up the message that we're winning with them again?
Well, I think we're not giving. We'll talk a bit more about this at the year end. I don't wanna give kind of latest update numbers, 'cause that'll come with the year-end numbers. But we've quoted one or two things already. We've already quoted, you know, over 2,000 practices using the Sage for Accountants. You know, I think what I'll say at a high level is, you know, both through the direct channels, so both coming in through the e-commerce channel and signing up on our website, and also through this additional engagement with accountants, we are making progress, and we are, you know, as I said, we'll give some update in terms of how we're doing on market share at the year-end results.
You can tell from the body language that, you know, we're very confident about the progress we're making.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Shifting gears slightly, we've had a question on the openness of our platform and our digital network. James, what has happened since acquisition in terms of partnership sales? From memory, GoProposal was also with Intuit and Xero and many others. What's happened since acquisition to those other partners?
Yeah, well, we're very respectful of those partners and the work that they're doing as well. We have some firms that are completely wedded to those, and we're fully committed to continuing to develop our integrations. You know, as soon as we got acquired, we did a live webinar, and we did a survey on, like, what were people's main concerns. The next two weeks after that, we launched developments to our Xero integration, you know? We're very respectful of accountants, and if we were to kind of stop developing those things, it would show that we're not doing what they actually want us to do.
You know, if they want to stick to that product, that's absolutely fine, but let's talk to you about GoProposal, and let's talk to you about how we can support your team and with AutoEntry and Futrli. Yeah, we're fully respectful of our competitors. That helps everyone to raise their game and, you know, we're appreciating that and doing what we can to drive it forward as well.
It's probably worth commenting on the way the digital network, isn't it? Yeah.
Exactly. Thank you, Steve. Absolutely, James. The days of you either are on one stack, one company that offers everything, those days are over in the software industry across the board. We are open for business to all. We have our own suites. Our strategy is really. We have our own suites. We built them with microservices that allows us to plug in services in there. We have a phenomenal backbone called the Sage Network. The Sage Network is an incredible asset for us. We put a lot of interaction in there. A lot of data flow goes through our Sage Network. By the way, this is data that goes from our products and also competitor products and partner products and end customer products. So there are no differentiation for the data for us.
If a competitor wants to actually go ahead and interact with us and use our AP services in the digital network, they are more than welcome to come in and use that. Intuit. Again, we will have these kind of services and they're into that model for us. What is super important for us is we wanna provide the customer with choice. You have choice with Sage, and we wanna provide you first-class choice. You have choice with our partners, and they will provide you with absolutely first-class choice. We will make these digital services available to partners to build on top of that. For competitors, we are very respectful. We're never gonna shut these things down.
We're gonna give you access to it and allow you to create services. The thing behind it is, we believe very strongly that Sage could service all and every single business and small medium customer, not just in the U.K., but worldwide. We think that you will be one of our customers at some point in time. Whether you use our suite or use somebody else's suite, you will be part of our digital network, and that's our strategy.
Excellent. Thank you very much. The next question is, when you win new business with accountants, are you typically displacing an existing accounting solution?
Let me take that bit. The answer is actually more complex. I thought initially it is a replacement. Actually, it's an additive. A lot of the accountants actually have multiple customers who use different pieces of software, and in significant portion, we're actually having an additive. That means an accountant would have a solution with a competitor, but then they look at our product services, and they would actually add that. In some cases, we have displacement. We have displaced some competitive products. The majority, I would say, are additive versus pure displacement.
Just to add to that, if I may. It's not just about kind of winning with accounting. It's helping the accountant win a new client upstream.
That's right.
We help them with their prospects, generate the proposal, deliver the letter of engagement, and at that point, we really influence then kind of what services and what products kind of could be delivered. We're really starting to own the end-to-end workflow, but our job is to help the accountant kind of win end to end and not in one specific place.
Great. Thank you. Shifting slightly onto product now. What are the core product differences for Sage Accounting relative to Xero and QuickBooks? Is it these differences that's driving success in the product, or is it more the go-to market, the branding, the channels?
Yeah. I think for me, it's a combination of all of the above. We've really kind of now improved our go-to-market. We've got an amazing brand launch, which I'm sure you've all seen. Everyone knows something different is happening at Sage. We've got our products now that serve all of the major needs for all of our customers, for our accountants. But more importantly, we've started to surround them with capabilities that solve more than an individual task or job. This means if you're a small business owner, at some point it's more than just accounting. If you're an accountant, again, it's more than just delivering accounting services for your clients. Our approach is really to build out our Small Business Suite, our suite for Sage for Accountants, which is really differentiated end to end.
The reason why it's differentiated is 'cause it's not just a set of marketplace integrations with different journeys and different experiences. We're creating a Sage experience based on our brand and our brand values with a frictionless experience end to end, so you can add in the capabilities you need. Really for me, that's our key differentiation, both with accountants for their practice, with the accountant for their clients, and also directly to the business owner.
Great. Thank you. A more general question now around innovation. The question is, you've given us examples of innovation. What have been the factors that have enabled us to step up the pace of change on innovation, and what have we learned that gives insight on what needs to happen to sustain, enhance and accelerate this?
Actually, I think what we should talk about here is that, 'cause I've talked in the past with investors about, when people have asked me about, "Do you have a problem with innovation?" I've said, "Well, actually, there's a lot of innovation taking place within Sage, and what we're working on is turning more of that innovation into an outcome for customers." Maybe you guys could talk about exactly that. You know, why have we been able to turn that into outcome?
I'll tell you, it really comes down to focus, and it comes down to great teams. We have actually an incredible talent in development organization, and we have enough resources to do all the things we wanted to do. From a funding point of view, I think we are super happy about where we are for an innovation element. The thing that Neal has spoke about several times, and I give him and his team a massive credit, is the way they rearchitected their product lines over the past few years. We went to a level we call microservices and new architecture that allows us to decouple the stack.
When you decouple the stack of development, it allows you to add services and move services in a completely different way and produce products and services to the marketplace at an unbelievable fast pace. We used to ship once every year, once every two years. You know, typical desktop shipping cycle. Right now, we ship once a month. We add capabilities once a month. Whenever we decide, we go in there. Neal and his team has done unbelievable job decomposing the stack and creating these services with the help of the digital network and allow us to consume the services in a very, very fast-paced environment.
Mm.
Lance?
I think, yeah, in addition to that, I would say one of the key changes for me is really about being market-led. What that really means is really being focused on the customer, understand the customer, jobs and the pain points, translating those into a set of market requirements, and then as we build them out in a platform service, we build them in a way that they can be consumed multiple times. Overall, what's changed with the approach as well is a huge amount of experimentation and allowing the team some flexibility on how they build and deliver the platform services, which then really create kind of new offerings like accounting and compliance in the service or employment verification. Again, it's all offered the same tech stack and the same approach that we've had in the past.
I think that's really fueling some of our innovation.
Yeah. Maybe James, if you comment a little bit, 'cause I think again, sometimes I get asked questions of, you know, when you make acquisitions and entrepreneurs come into Sage, you know, is innovation immediately stifled as we sort of, you know, bring these entrepreneurial teams? You made an interesting comment, I thought, in your presentation, where you were talking about how you've been a bit surprised that we've been kind of asking and learning from you. Maybe just a few words. You've also introduced a couple of new products. From an innovation point of view, how do you feel now that you're kind of part of a bigger group?
Yeah. We could have never achieved the growth in the product that we've had over the last 12 months had we not been acquired by Sage. Neal's helped us to build out that squad and preserve us as we are, to have agile working and to give them all, you know, autonomy to continue doing what they're doing and to plug into the rest of the network as well. We run experiments, and my team did a hackathon last week, whereby they split into five pairs. There's 10 of them, and they all had to develop a new feature for GoProposal that didn't exist within one day.
One of them developed a mobile app, one of them developed something else, and they all presented it, and they picked a prize by the end of it, just to show how fast.
Yeah
We can now work and just to encourage that e-environment. Whereas before, we'd struggle with certain things like have we got the security of this right? Have we got the legalities of this part right? I've now got teams within Sage that we can go to and just tap into these huge resources that can give us the expertise that we need to grow and move forward.
Fantastic.
I think the other, the big thing as well, to tie into what you were saying as well in terms of the speed at which we can go, is the proximity to the market and the deep understanding of the accounting industry as well. You know, in the last 24 hours, I've been closely connected to three accounting firms, talking to the CEO. You were speaking to a firm owner last week and then passing them to me, and I was speaking to them. It's that deep understanding that no other software company has of this market.
Mm.
I think the other thing I would add to that, which I think is different now, which kind of creates a much better framework for innovation, is having a really clear global strategy kind of within Sage. The teams now have a level of freedom around how they operate and what they need to do around development, to drive innovation, but it's all within a strategic framework with a set of global strategies, which I think allows us to then put our investments in the right place, and then those investments can yield lots of benefits over multiple channels and multiple geographies.
Excellent.
Thanks.
The next question is a more general question actually on migration. Can you please talk through the potential to migrate customers onto products like Sage Intacct? Do you see much of an opportunity here?
Let me take that one. The answer is absolutely yes, for the right customer at the right time. This is. I don't believe in forced migrations. I don't believe in taking a customer from what they love to go push them to other element because it's convenient for sale. You have to think of what's important for customer. Neal had a slide. If you looked at the slide of the growth, the scale stage, we are at the scale stage right now in Sage. We're gonna tell the customers basically, if you're a small customer, if you're a small entity and if you bet on us, we guarantee you that we're gonna be with you for a long time until you grow and auto grow.
We have this product lines in here in the small, then we have medium, and we could graduate you from this. By the way, graduating you from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct, it's actually fully automated. You don't have to actually go ahead and get consultants or get all this kind of services and add up kind of cost. We actually have a migration path for you, but it happens only when you are ready for that and when it's time for you to grow into the business.
Just to add to that, I think in the future, migration's definitely the wrong question. It's much more about how customers kind of grow and scale and upgrade, and if required, how they downgrade as well, depending on what the business dynamic is. In the future, it's really about that flexibility to move up and down the stack, use the modules they need when they need them based on where their business is at that point in time. Much less one-off migrations because all the data's in the digital network.
Right.
It'll just be a seamless movement up and down the application stack.
This is such an important point. I think, you know, when we've been asked, and obviously it's this type of question we get asked a lot. When the products are all essentially standalone products, even if they sit on a single platform, the effort to migrate is not just about migrating the financial package or migrating the general ledger. It's about all the workflows that are associated with it. You know, Sage 50 is a really good example of this because we have customers who've used the product for 15, 20, 25 years, and they've developed integrated workflows all around the product. What we're doing now with the Sage Network is we're creating microservices, we're creating automation like accounts payable, accounts receivable automation.
That whether you're a Sage Intacct customer or a Sage 50 customer, you'll be able to pull these things down, so you can start to effectively kind of-
Disaggregate your workflows without moving your entire package all at the same time. This allows customers to move and consume more cloud services in a much more seamless way than just throwing the whole thing out and having to bring a whole new system, including all the workflows.
I just wanna add to that. It's not just for Sage 50. The services-
Yeah.
We're curating that for our customers, our competitor products from Intuit, QuickBooks or from Xero.
Yeah.
We're doing the same thing for migration or, you know, upgrading, not migrating.
I can give a real example of that. A friend of mine has got one of the five fastest-growing businesses in the U.K. In the last four years, gone from 0 to GBP 33 million in revenue, and they've recently migrated from a competitive product over to Sage Intacct. It was the only product that was gonna support them, and sustain them in their growth.
Good.
Thank you very much. Shifting topics slightly, Making Tax Digital was mentioned multiple times in the presentation. With the increased focus of winning in small, is Sage seeing Making Tax Digital as more of a tailwind than before? Because that's something that competitors, perhaps like Xero, have highlighted more than Sage in the past.
Yeah. I think it's definitely gonna be a market requirement, not just in the U.K. as well as across kind of Europe, and other countries. The digitization of tax and record keeping is a consistent trend we continue to see. In the U.K., as that comes into effect, it opens up kind of the need for sole traders and landlords initially to have to keep digital records, which creates a much bigger opportunity in the market. We're already serving that opportunity. We're already approved by HMRC in market today, and we do see that as a future opportunity. I think it's really gonna depend how that evolves over time and what timeline, and seeing how those timelines potentially change.
I think it's the depth of solutions as well, isn't it? It's not, you know, anyone can talk about MTD and how it's impacting the accounting industry and what it's gonna look like. To my understanding, it's that depth of product, that depth of support that we've had is unrivaled in the space.
I think it's worth adding that kind of when we think about Making Tax Digital too, it's not just about record keeping and submitting tax. It's also about, think of the accountant, if they've already got a relationship with a client, they need to actually change the letter of engagement and the service description because now they need to do like five, six submissions a year and not just one annually, which really smooths out kind of the work and the demands. Also those accountants, as new prospects come in, they're gonna have to find a way to deal with a volume of prospects in a very automated fashion. MTD is both about the individual taxpayer digitizing their records, but it's also about how the accountant can support them in the best way through digitization and automation.
I think both of those are big opportunities. There are changes in the market. We've already responded. We're ready to go, and we're just ready.
Thank you. In your description of building the small business engine, for example, in the annual report, you mentioned taking the approach you developed in the U.K., and scaling it internationally. What does this roadmap look like, and what are you prioritizing?
Yeah. I think, first and foremost, we wanna make sure that we've got it successfully delivered in the U.K. The blueprint we're using on the platform services, and the entire tech stack is completely deliverable in any other country. We're prioritizing that based on the different market opportunities we see. Some of those are because we've got a strong ability to execute. Some of those are based on the size of the market opportunity, so it's a very attractive market. It's all been built in a way where we can pick and choose and prioritize based on the dynamics of the marketplace. Watch this space. There's more countries to come. The platform's built and ready to go.
Yeah, yeah. I just think that Neal is being humble a little bit. This is the very first time, one of the very first times, where we take the entire Sage 50 platform, all of it across the board, all the services, and we're being actually global, okay? We get to choose to deliver the services. Take, you know, Sage HR. It's actually global. Take the payroll system, and most of our geography is in there. Take 50 different components. It's actually more of our choice where to go going forward, and we wanna actually be very deliberate and to capture the biggest market share and start going and attacking other markets in there versus a technology issue. It's no longer a technology issue. It's no longer a platform issue.
This is right now strategy execution and go to market. Because we will not go without the great support. We wanna have great support. We wanna have all these services. We wanna give a great customer experience, and that's kinda what the discipline that the team is approaching.
Great. Thank you. You showed a slide, which showed how value builds as a customer grows and scales. Can you provide some more color on your attach rates and how these are helping to contribute towards growth?
Yeah. I think that's a great question. I think it's both the attach rates up front on point of acquisition, but also in life expansion. The one that always springs to mind as a stat, we talked about the digital channel, 90% acquisition via that digital channel. Well, when we drive acquisition for accounting via digital channel, approximately about 25% of all of those customers also buy payroll. We kind of see that joint value proposition being key. What then happens in life is once they start delivering the payroll services, they already then get some of the core HR capabilities 'cause they get online payslips and payslips on the mobile app.
What we see in life is adding more HR modules as that business grows, whether it's around kind of recruitment, kind of shift scheduling, absence management, performance. Whatever it might be, they get added in as those business need them. That's really the expansion we see on the back end.
I think one of the things that's really exciting going forward is we have a number of different points now where you can consume your first Sage experience. Whether it be GoProposal, or whether it be Futrli, or whether you buy HR. You know, whereas traditionally it would have always been that really your first point of call was accounting, and then we would try and attach something else to it, and that remains important in terms of getting you to look at the whole suite. We have more entry points now, and I think that's a really important point. As you said as well, James, not only do we have more entry points, but we're not forcing you to consume the whole thing.
We're asking you to come in, take a look, and experience at your own pace what it is that you need for your, you know, for your business needs.
The common theme that connects all of those, and you see a lot of this on social media, is the quality of the service and the delivery and the support that they get as well.
Yeah.
You see this constantly being discussed of how they're wowed by whatever.
Yeah
product it is that they use, which then makes them feel more comfortable and to trust.
Yeah
Using the next product as well.
Great. Thank you. I think we've got time for one more, this is a more general one. Looking ahead, what sort of M&A should we anticipate? Will it be similar technology-type deals as with GoProposal and Futrli, or are we expecting to do something more transformative?
Let me start, and then the guys can add. I mean, in terms of the general strategy, the focus is on making acquisitions that allow us to really accelerate the rate at which we are able to offer more things to our customers through the digital network that solve their pain points. Now we will stay true to that kind of back office automation, et cetera. What we're trying to do with small-midsize businesses is just make their ability to run their businesses seamless and also offer them additional insight so that they can grow and thrive in their own businesses.
It will be more focused on that sort of capability as opposed to, you know, you're unlikely to see us acquiring a business in order to go into a new market. We've just spent the last few years sort of rationalizing our footprint down. In a digital world, as we expand our global capability, you don't necessarily have to be present in the country anyway. It's gonna be that kinda focus on technology. Particular areas that you're interested in?
I'll tell you one thing. There is only one thing in my mind, and only one, and that's growth, responsible growth. We are all about growth. We've rearchitected our platforms, we're rearchitecting our products to allow us to really give great customer experience for growth. Any M&A activity we do has to take that into account, with maintaining the margins at a healthy level and expansion margin, you know, in that area. What we are not interested in development at a minimum is to do something that is gonna dilute that vision for us for at least for the next three years or four years in there. I strongly believe that we have the right set of capabilities.
Now, there will always be opportunistic technologies that we wanna buy here and there, but we have the right set of capabilities to deliver for the next two-three years. We're not technology-constrained into the marketplace. Everything we wanna do in the technology has to be very opportunistic with a significant eye on growth and top line.
I think for me, just within the product strategies at [click-through], there's probably three things I look for. Number one is does it serve an unmet or underserved market need for our customers in the segments and the verticals that we're serving? Number two, can I create value around it within the products and the product offering? Number three, can I scale it through the go-to-market infrastructure? If I can do all of those, then it's a great candidate to look at.
Yeah.
Amazing. We are at 90 minutes now, so we don't have time to take any more questions today I'm afraid. If we haven't answered your question, then we will follow up with you shortly. If you have further questions, then you know where we are. Please do get in touch. With that, I'll hand back to Steve.
Yeah, just thank you to all of you for taking time out of your schedules to spend with us. You know, you're all busy people. 90 minutes is a big investment, but hopefully that you feel that investment was worthwhile. Hopefully you can see, we've talked about how now we're entering into a period where we're here to grow and scale Sage right across the board, both small and medium. As you heard today, also, you know, we've had a big focus, quite rightly, on the U.K. and the U.S. What we're also now doing is using that capability to expand across all of our chosen territories and chosen markets.
The philosophy at Sage, and you'll hear more about this at the year end, as Walid said, is very much we're here to grow, we're here to scale, and we believe both in small and medium, we have the ingredients to do that, and we'll update you with the numbers in November. Thanks for your time.
Thank you.