Sage

Sage began in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1981, when printing business owner David Goldman needed software to work out job estimates and enlisted programmer Paul Muller and student Graham Wylie. The accounting package that came out of it was sold to other small businesses, and Sage then grew by buying local accounting vendors in one country after another.

That made the company big but fragmented, with dozens of products that did not talk to each other. The move to the cloud has meant consolidating them, including the 2017 purchase of US-based Sage Intacct. Sage is listed on the FTSE 100 and competes with Visma and Fortnox in the Nordics and Intuit in the US — the same dull but profitable market everywhere: VAT returns.