I will immediately do the same. 

You can't ... not until your new provider can access their system - they have us hostage. This should be taken to the media.

Speak to your new provider, the system is available between 7pm and 7am a lot of the time. You can then send them what they need

We used cloudconvert.co.za to migrate our data to Xero. They migrate the last 2 years at no charge.

The only issue we had was the recons had not been completed due to the downtime, but once it was on Xero it was relatively straight forward to sort out.

We are currently quoting from Xero, and duplicating th invoice to sage until the end of next month. After our financial year end we will cancel with sage.

We are also most likely moving our Payroll to simplepay.co.za as I do not wish to support Sage in anyway after this.

we managed to migrate last weekend while the system was stable for more than 10 min

Whats the procedure in migrating?

cloudcovert.co.za just ask for your login info to Sage, then you select the amount of years you would like to migrate.

Once they complete the migration they will send you the invoice. Once you pay they send you a link to sign up for Xero and take over the migrated company.

We selected the tracked inventory migration, which we should not have done. We mostly charge for services (which are not stock items), which i have had to re-create in Xero. The regular items that are in stock migrated perfectly though.

Scott, is the pricing all based in USD$, or is there a SA site. I'm nervous to tie into a dollar based expense. I did that once before and the instability of the Rand caused havoc with my expenses.

Unfortunately the pricing is dollar based.

We also looked at Zoho books which had some better stock management features and they bill in Rand, but according to the forums, the FNB banks feeds dont work which is a no go for us.

Definitely trying this, thank you. How is the experience with Xero so far? 

Thanks Scott. I'll continue my research.

It takes a bit of getting used to. I find the interface to be a bit simple, but once we created our templates it is pretty straight forward.

The banks feeds work perfectly and we can issue quotes much faster, so thats a plus.

I still prefer Sage's interface, but I was already looking at alternatives last year when they had the bank feeds fiasco.

I actually registered a trial on Xero with my gmail address first before migrating. Used their demo company to test the functionality, before we decided to migrate.

Have you managed to check that the convert ran smoothly? WE used Cloud Convert to move from Pastel Partner to Sage and it was a disaster. Took months to fix it up and we are still having issues.

So far everything looks ok. The reporting is out, which they did say it would be. They also suggested using the old vat report and closing off the entries in Xero for the current VAT period. That said, I ran a profit and loss report last night on Sage and the sales were not the same as the total invoice report from them, so the report was completely useless.

We are basically quoting from Xero only, but invoicing and capturing supplier invoices in both systems.

At the end of next month we will close off the financial year and move completely to Xero.

At least for now we can continue to operate and get client payments in, but it is a mission waiting for sage to work so that we can duplicate the entries every evening.