Formats & pricing
Do you want your practice set to be automatically graded or are you happy
to do the grading yourself? Do you want AntiCheat functionality or are you
satisfied with students collaborating in group learning environments?
Do you want students to receive feedback as they go, or are
you willing for students to receive either no feedback at all, or only feedback that you
deliver yourself after your students have submitted their entire practice set?
We offer two Sage 50 titles in three formats
(paper, Excel and VirtualTutor) each with different features, benefits and costs. Not
all titles are available in all formats.
The following table summarizes the price and features of each of our three formats
and sets out which titles are available in what formats. The formats are described in
more detail below the table, as is our pricing policy.
More information on available formats
FREE paper:
Students receive an electronic copy of their scenario, transaction list and Peachtree
reference guide from the Perdisco website and save money by printing it themselves
(or not printing it at all and using it in electronic format). Please note that our
Sage 50 2013 title is not published in paper format.
Students also gain free access to our
Peachtree Learning Center
Order a review copy.
FREE Excel:
Students use our FREE paper practice set as above and combine that with the submission
of key figures in Excel format. When combined with electronic copies of Peachtree
reports, this approach allows instructors to have students submit their practice
set in an entirely electronic format (say through email or a university course management
system) ready for manual grading. Please note that our
Sage 50 2013 title is not published in Excel format.
Students also gain free access to our
Peachtree Learning Center
Order a review copy.
VirtualTutor online:
As an alternative to the traditional paper booklet and manual grading approach,
Perdisco's VirtualTutor practice set requires students to work in the Sage 50
software and transcribe their results to the our website for automatic grading,
with results reported directly to instructors.
Students also receive immediate feedback
and benefit from our back-on-track functionality, which ensures they do not carry
the same errors throughout their entire practice set. Instructors not only benefit
from our AutoGrade technology but also our
AntiCheat functionality.
Our VirtualTutor online practice set is fully integrated with our
Sage 50 Learning Center that
has been built into the VirtualTutor practice set itself. This means your
students will be able to access the Learning Center from within their
practice set as and when they require the support that it affords.
Our VirtualTutor online practice sets, while not free, are priced at
less than half the cost of competing practice sets. Yet the benefits that
they offer to both instructors and students make the choice to
adopt one of our VirtualTutor titles a very simple one indeed!
Order a review copy of the Electronics Specialist
title or the Corporate Gift Baskets title.
Pricing policy
Free practice sets? What's the catch? There isn't one.
If your undergraduate accounting course is taught at a government-recognized higher education body
in the United States, you can adopt a
Perdisco practice set and have your students complete it without paying any money to Perdisco.
There are no hidden costs and no advertising. Our free practice sets (complete with
textbook quality Peachtree instruction) are just the same
as those that the other publishers are charging your students up to $140 each for!
If you teach a postgraduate or corporate education course,
or if you teach in another country, please contact us for
more information on pricing.
Why do we publish certain sets for free? Because, when you compare
our free practice sets to everything else that Perdisco can achieve for you and your students
using our VirtualTutor practice sets, free is all we think a traditional paper practice set is
actually worth! We are simply giving away what students are already taking for free anyway.
If you use a paper practice set from another publisher today, many of your students are already
(illegally) copying it and cheating by sharing or buying solutions from friends and prior
students. Where's the $140 value in that? (For either you, your students or the publisher?)
So, why would you adopt a free practice set? Of course, while we are
generally critical of traditional paper-bound practice sets, you are still using them in
your courses because they have some academic merit (we also agree with this or we would not
choose to publish them in our catalog). In particular, if you want to encourage your students
to undertake low-stakes self-study or active group collaboration on an accounting project,
then a traditional paper-bound practice set is ideal. And you can now do this for free.
How does Perdisco's paid practice set compete with our free ones?
By solving the problems of traditional paper practice sets and offering genuine value
to you and your students. The problems solved are to
stop cheating, to remove your
grading and feedback
workloads and to dramatically lower the price. While our
feature-rich VirtualTutor online practice set does come at a cost to students,
it is still a fraction of the price of many traditional practice sets on the market.
Since it is so functional, why is Perdisco's paid practice set so cheap?
We deliberately price our paid resources at a level that is realistic and achievable for students.
We rely on our adopters, such as yourself, to continue using us across many semesters and
recommending us to colleagues. If you like what we are doing, then please adopt us and tell
others about our resources (we also publish textbooks and workbooks as well as practice sets).
Using a practice set in your course right now? If you compare your
current practice set with what we have to offer, we're certain that Perdisco can provide you
with all the value-added features you want, while still saving your students money.
Sage 50 software download
Students will need access to 'Sage 50 Complete Accounting' to make use of our Sage 50
practice sets. Sage 50 is the new name for the accounting software that used to be called
Peachtree. Sage 50 is a popular accounting software package used extensively by small and
medium businesses throughout the United States. Most instructors would already be aware that
Sage 50 is a third-party software application written by Sage Software. Perdisco does not write
the Sage 50 software ourselves and is not associated with Sage Software in any way. Rather,
Perdisco is a publisher who creates learning resources for accounting instructors to use in their
classes to teach the Sage 50 software and/or Accounting Information Systems in general.
From 2013, all of our Sage 50 practice sets automatically
include a student license to use the Sage 50 software. Students are free to download the
included student copy of Sage 50 or access the software through other means such as site licenses
in campus computer labs or existing copies at home or work.
Please note that our previous Peachtree
practice sets do not automatically include a license to use the Peachtree software but we
offer the option to purchase and download the student license required for historic
versions of the Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting software.
A student license provides a fully functional copy of the software with a 14 month time limit.
A student license requires that it be used by a full or part time student
or faculty member for their own study-related (non-commercial) purposes.
Sage Software does not offer support services under the student license of its
software but students are free to use the public knowledge base resources
provided by Sage Software on its website as well as the free Learning Center provided by Perdisco.
Please note that while Perdisco's practice sets can be used on both Windows and Macintosh
computer systems, the Sage 50 (and Peachtree) software can only be used on
Windows-based computers. Instructors should be aware that Sage 50 only works on Microsoft
Windows and the possible implications this may have for some of their students before prescribing
its use.
More information
Contact us to find out more or to order a review copy.