Your Next Accountant Won't Use Sage. They'll Ask Why Your Business Still Does.
Generational Shift in Expert-Comptable Tool Preferences and the Legacy Software Sunset Trajectory
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The expert-comptable who set up your Sage account is probably thinking about retirement. In their office, they have client files going back twenty years, a deep familiarity with Sage's interface, and a genuine understanding of your business. When they recommend you renew your Sage subscription for another year, they mean well — they are recommending what they know.
Their successor was trained on something else entirely.
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Consider a SARL — a French private limited company — in Nantes that has run on Sage for twelve years. The founding accountant retires in 2025. The firm brings in a 30-year-old partner who built her practice on Pennylane — she migrated her first ten clients from Sage in 2022 and never looked back. In her first meeting with the Nantes SARL, she asks the question she asks every new client: "Why are you paying €160 a month for accounting software when Liberté is free and connects directly to my workspace?"
Nobody had asked that question before. Not because it was a bad question. Because nobody who knew the answer had been in the room.
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The number behind the succession
Sage holds approximately 300,000 business customers in France with a 94% annual renewal rate. That figure is often cited as proof of satisfaction. It is not. It is proof of switching cost. When the time and accountant hours required to migrate years of data exceed the cost of another year's subscription, businesses renew — not because they chose to stay, and not because the product is irreplaceable — leaving simply feels too expensive.
Your accountant recommends Sage because they know Sage. Their successor recommends the platform they built their practice on. You are paying for the gap between those two recommendations.
Pennylane reached 6,000 partner accounting firms by 2025, built since its 2015 launch by convincing entire practices to rebuild their workflow. In January 2026, the company raised €175 million at a €3.6 billion valuation — more than six times Sage's annual French revenue. That valuation is a prediction: the market believes Pennylane will eventually occupy the position Sage currently holds. The accounting firms switching are expressing that prediction with their actual practice decisions.
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How professional generations move markets
Accounting software adoption follows a professional generation cycle. Expert-comptables adopt the tools they trained on, recommend them to clients for ten to fifteen years, and then retire. The next generation arrives with different tools and different defaults. Sage captured a generation of accountants who built their practices between 1995 and 2010. That generation is now in its peak retirement window.
With approximately 21,000 expert-comptable firms in France, practices formed after 2018 are built on cloud platforms. Practices formed before 2010 are largely still on legacy tools. Every succession — every senior partner who retires and hands their client base to a younger associate — is a moment where the software question gets asked from scratch.
Two timelines are converging right now: the retirement wave of the Sage-native accounting generation, running roughly from 2025 to 2035, and Liberté's launch in Q2 2026. This timing is not accidental.
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What the acquisitions signal
Cegid — one of France's two largest accounting software vendors, with €967 million in annual revenue — acquired EBP in 2024 and Shine (400,000 bank customers) in late 2025. Two acquisitions in consecutive years, both aimed at market segments the company could not reach through product growth alone. Large incumbent vendors are purchasing positions they can no longer grow into. That is not a sign of a healthy market. It is a sign of a market where existing customers keep renewing because switching feels too hard, and new customers are going elsewhere.
In 2024, France saw 1.1 million new business formations — up 6% from the year before. Every one of those businesses is choosing its accounting software for the first time right now. A new business formed in 2026 asks a modern accountant which platform to use. That accountant recommends what they actually use. That recommendation is not Sage.
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What Liberté actually replaces
Most entrepreneurs receive their accounting software recommendation from their accountant. The accountant recommends what they know — it is efficient, not dishonest. What this produces is a software decision made by someone else, using criteria from a different decade, for reasons that had more to do with professional familiarity than with your business's actual needs.
Direct connections to French government portals are at the core of how Liberté works. When you file your DSN — the monthly social security declaration that every company with employees must submit, due by the 5th or 15th of each month, with a penalty of €58.88 per employee for each month it's late — the data goes from your environment to net-entreprises.fr (the government's official machine-to-machine portal). No third-party service sits in between charging you monthly for the relay.
Bank reconciliation works through PSD2 Open Banking — the EU regulation that requires your bank to share your transaction data at no cost. FEC-compliant export, the standardized accounting file that tax authorities can demand with 15 days' notice (with a €5,000 minimum penalty if you cannot produce it), is a standard function, not a paid add-on. Sage charges extra for these capabilities. Liberté is free the same way Android is free — the platform is open to everyone, with revenue from a marketplace of optional paid services built on top.
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The switching cost question, answered
Waiting for your accountant to initiate the software conversation is not a neutral choice. It is a decision to let someone else's timeline determine when you move. Businesses that evaluate Liberté before any succession pressure make the transition on their own terms — with time to migrate carefully, verify everything, and avoid disrupting a year-end close.
An accountant familiar with both platforms estimates roughly 20 hours of migration work: data export, setup, verification. At €150 per accountant hour, the total is around €3,000 in transition effort, managed at a calm time of year. Compare that to forced migration: a new accountant, disrupted workflow, historical data to reconcile mid-year, and friction added to a relationship that is already adjusting. Moving on your own schedule is cheaper, faster, and entirely within your control.
Three hundred thousand French businesses on Sage renew at 94% because leaving is hard, not because staying is better. Every practice succession narrows that gap. Businesses that move first will have accumulated data, automated declarations, and a simpler accounting relationship long before anyone thinks to ask them why.
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The question you answer before they ask it
At some point, your new accountant will ask why your business uses legacy software. The answer "we already moved to Liberté" takes one conversation. The answer "we need to migrate and it will disrupt our year-end" takes six months.
Liberté launches Q2 2026 in France. Joining the waitlist at liberte.free takes two minutes. The professional generation asking the question is already here — building practices on modern platforms, recommending them to every new client, and inheriting established client bases from the Sage-trained generation retiring around them.
You can have the answer ready before the question arrives.