Sage 50

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And that gradually grew over time into building a finance software product called Exchequer, which you may have heard of.

It was a mid-market, obviously UK-based system and was competing at the time with the likes of Sage 50, 100, Pegasus, Sun and Great Planes and Navision, all those players.

And we built that fairly modestly, but slowly over about a 20-year period.

And we eventually ran out of steam at the age of 38.

Yes, and we're seeing that right now.

We're seeing 2026 has been a year where we've seen a lot of procrastination, where CFOs recognize the need for change.

They've been using typically a legacy on-premises system for the last 15, 20 years, like Rob's Exchequer, or it could be Sage 50 or Pegasus or any one of the numerous others that are out there.

And they know it's time to change.

And back in those days, they didn't have an open API that made it even technically possible.

So you had to build these kind of widgets that you would download onto someone's desktop to pull all their Sage 50 information out and migrate it across to Xero.

But it was, it's like, It should be possible, and I think companies, software companies should stand by their products and say, my product is good enough to, yeah, of course you can come off it, and we don't hold you hostage.

That's not the way we operate, but you won't want to come off it because it's a great product.

I remember my days at Xero, and we were obviously going after Sage.

It was just Sage 50, switch it across the cloud.

It was like bread and butter.

And then you have Intuit, who, like, obviously we had that, we were going into the US, but Intuit, massive in the US, less so in the UK, and they did just that.