Sage 50 Accounting - Peachtree Software

Sage 50 Accounting (US) is a business management software subscription-based product published by Sage Group and sold in the United States. It was previously called Peachtree Accounting (U.S.). A conversion to the Peachtree / Sage 50 U.S. data format was made available when Simply Accounting (U.S.) was taken off the market. As of the 2013 edition, the U.S. software is now called Sage 50 (U.S).

The Simply Accounting software once known as Bedford Accounting was renamed to Sage 50 Canadian. The Canadian software shared the new brand name with its unrelated U.S. counterpart in 2013, but continues to be separately developed and supported.

History

Peachtree Accounting was originally sold by a software publisher founded in 1978 by Ben Dyer, Ron Roberts, Steve Mann, and John Hayes. The company was carved out of The Computer SystemCenter, an early Altair dealer founded by Roberts, Mann, Jim Dunion, and Rich Stafford, which Dyer had joined as the manager and where the first software was published in 1977. The company expanded its offerings with its acquisition of Layered, an accounting program designed for use on the Macintosh. The company's products were included in the initial launch of the IBM Personal Computer, and it was acquired by Management Science America (MSA) in June 1981.

By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Peachtree was the world's seventh-largest microcomputer-software company, with $21.7 million in 1983 sales. After several subsequent changes of ownership ending with ADP, Peachtree was eventually acquired by the Sage Group in 1998 for US$145 million. Peachtree was the first business software introduced for microcomputers and the oldest microcomputer computer program for business in current use, with the possible exception of the original Microsoft Basic interpreters, also introduced in 1975.