Sage Summit Shines a Light on Small Business in Atlanta

Stephen Kelly, CEO of Sage.

CREDIT: Courtesy Sage Staff

Sage, creator of a business management and accounting software suite with headquarters in Atlanta, held their Sage Summit at the Georgia World Congress Center to a packed crowd of business owners, partners and accountants. The three-day conference was a powerful representation of Sage’s continued dedication to service the business owner from startup to scale up and beyond.

Kasim Reed, whose history with Sage included opening one of their first offices in Atlanta, joined CEO Stephen Kelly on stage during the keynote to share compelling statistics about why Atlanta is the “place to be” to build a successful enterprise.

Some of these facts include:

• Atlanta is among 5 the fastest cities adding jobs to the economy, and the only city with that designation East of the Mississippi.
• There are approximately 275,000 higher education students contributing to the growing need of talent to support successful business growth.
• The city is spending 4 billion in construction – double the amount spent leading up to the 1996 Olympic games.

Stephen Kelly, Sage’s CEO continued the keynote by sharing Sage’s dedication to supporting the business owner throughout the lifecycle of their business. Kelly covered initiatives underway at Sage that give business owners a greater voice, stories about Sage’s nonprofit foundation that works to support veterans, empower women in technology fields, and encourage economic growth and overall stability in third world countries, and finally he shared about Sage’s focus on cutting edge technology such as artificial intelligence, internet of things and robotics.

Sage is investing heavily in leading edge technologies as a way to free the business owner from menial tasks allowing them more time to focus on the important aspects of running and leading their business. This is evidenced by the release and continued improvement of Pegg, accounting’s very first chatbot, that integrates to accounting software allowing business owners to ask natural language questions like “how much money do I have?” and “which customers have overdue invoices?” Pegg also learns how to take care of repetitive tasks like coding expenses and sending out reminders.

Sage’s footprint is large. Their software serves as an underlying technology to many companies. In fact, they are the market leader in the UK, Africa, Spain, France, Ireland and Canada, with more than 3 million customers. 53% of employees in the UK are paid through a Sage-enabled system and Sage’s customers move over $4 trillion a year.

The conference was filled with partner companies that provide solutions that build upon and extend the Sage platform. From timesheets to human resources to tax collection and reporting, Sage can serve as the one platform to meet the many needs of a growing business.

As part of the conference agenda, Sage created a powerful learning environment covering topics like cash flow and timekeeping. These sessions ran in conjunction with others focused on the true reason Sage exists and the driver of their technology improvements – their customers.

The conference was a powerful reminder of Sage’s commitment to continued innovation and market leadership in the years to come.