PeachFuzz

There has been lots of “activity” at Sage over the past few months, suggesting that the company is, in their own phrasing, undergoing a “transformation” of sorts. What that might bode for the future of “the product formerly known as Peachtree” (soon to be Sage 50 2013 – U.S. Edition; quite a mouthful!) has been the subject of much speculation among the community of Peachtree Certified Consultants (of which TriStar is one).

In attempting to “read the tea leaves” we have observed the following:

1. The Peachtree product line has been “re-branded” from its 30+ year name to a more corporate brand name (Sage 50)
2. Rumors initially circulated that, effective with 2013 release, the product would only be available via subscription. This position was rather quickly reversed. For now, only new licensees are required to purchase via subscription, not  existing licensees.
3. A very strong and concerted effort has been launched by various Sage “Inside Sales” reps to sell Peachtree BusinessCare “subscriptions” masquerading as 2012 upgrade licenses, in advance of the 2013 release. In more than a few instances those sales calls have been made, to customers officially registered to reseller accounts (allegedly a no-no at Sage), with the “misinformation” that subscriptions will become the only way to upgrade existing licenses.
4. A “pricing du jour” approach to selling upgrade licenses has been rolled out by Sage, with various “limited time special pricing” offers for 2012 upgrade licenses being circulated a few times per month, in an apparently concerted effort to move as many currently licensed users as possible to the 2012 edition prior to the release of the 2013 edition.
5. A significant (>10% in some instances) price increase, for both new and upgrade licenses, has been put in place for the 2013 edition of the product, which will release in mid-May.
6. The “Inside Partner Advocate” staff at Sage (the individuals who serve as liaison between Sage and its reseller/consultant community) has been reduced from 3 people to 2, leaving those two individuals to provide liaison services for 250+ resellers/consultants across the U.S. We have lost our most critical Sage relationship as a result of this reduction.

We can infer from all of these observations that Sage is attempting to distance itself from whatever “cachet” the Peachtree brand has delivered over its many years in existence.  Apparently the company is now firmly on the path toward an “integrated services” sales model. This will likely result in the end of “perpetual product licensing” sales, in favor of an “annual software subscription” sales model, bundled with 800 number phone support and various ancillary “services” (for which extra charges will apply in most instances, as an “upsell”).

Reading these tea leaves, we predict that by the time of the next product release (following the 2013 edition):

1. The Sage 50 product will only be available via subscription, for both new and existing customers
2. Customers not on the “current” version (by then Sage 50 2013) of the product will be expected to pay a premium to upgrade their existing licenses (this has recently been introduced as a policy with other Sage products)

In this new business model, it seems to us, there is clearly no need for a reseller/certified consultant channel. That makes our future with “the product formerly known as Peachtree” somewhat cloudy. License sales will - very likely – no longer be part of our business model, nor will annual Quantum subscription renewals. All of these orders will need to be placed directly with Sage.

We of course do not intend to fade away as a result of this “transformation”, or abandon our software support  or technology advisory role with our clients. Our knowledge of Peachtree will not suddenly disappear if we are no longer able to sell licenses to our clients. We recognize that many clients prefer a face-to-face relationship with a local consultant provider, who understands their business as much as the software supporting that business, and who can place the software in the larger context of the technology deployed at your company.

It does suggest, however, that our overall business model at TriStar, and the suite of products for which we offer support, may need to be modified to conform to this “new reality”. We are hard at work on this task at present, looking for the right combination of product support and general software and technology advice that will be of the greatest value to our clients.

If you have thoughts as to how we might be of value to your business as you navigate the tricky currents of emerging technology, I encourage you to share them with us so that we can move forward together and continue delivering valuable services to our client base.

We received product pricing information Monday morning for Sage’s “early bird pricing” for upgrades from existing versions of Peachtree to the soon-to-be-released Sage 50 – 2013 Edition. As has been their custom, Sage’s “special pricing” changes monthly, based on proximity to the actual release date (slated for May 14).

Since this year there is not only a name change, but a push to incorporate annual subscriptions into renewal pricing (under the name “BusinessCare”), we expect users to be inundated with confusing offers, both from Sage directly and from other software sources. Before committing to an upgrade purchase, we strongly urge you to give us a call to review the details of any upgrade offer you receive. In many cases we are able to match – or beat – any upgrade pricing offered directly by Sage, by virtue of our purchase volume with that vendor.

Below is a grid showing upgrade prices for the next three months for various Peachtree versions and user counts. These prices do not include the optional BusinessCare subscription which is required for all first-time purchasers.

Upgrade licenses for Peachtree 2012 are still available for purchase, and will remain available through the end of April. If you are not committed to running “the latest and greatest” edition of Peachtree, you may be able to save between $100 and $200 on the prices listed above, by purchasing the 2012 product instead of the 2013 edition.

Per the reseller webinar on Tuesday, March 27, Sage has announced its new policy on purchasing Peachtree – soon to be Sage 50 – licenses. All new users will be required to purchase a BusinessCare subscription to the application as a condition of purchase. Existing licensees will not be required to purchase BusinessCare in order to purchase an upgrade license. BusinessCare will be strongly recommended, but will remain optional (for this year).

For Peachtree Quantum users, nothing has changed at all. The same policy that has been in effect since the introduction of Quantum remains in effect. New Peachtree Complete and Premium users will essentially be brought into the same subscription program that has existed for Quantum all along.

So if you are using Peachtree Quantum already, you can stop reading at this point. The rest of this message applies only to Peachtree Complete and Premium users.

While not mandatory this year for license upgrades, it appears that BusinessCare subscriptions will be very attractively priced, and may be a good opportunity for those that think this approach could be useful. From our perspective, we believe the four principal benefits of BusinessCare are:

1. automatic license renewals on an annual basis, for a defined price identified and paid for in advance
2. 800-number support for “simple” technical questions regarding use of the software – not, however, for business-related, environmental, or “best practice” type of questions; these typically bounce to us as the local support entity.
3. A license activation for Peachtree Business Intelligence. This is a very handy tool for custom report development (using Excel) that is somewhat more flexible, and easier to use, than Crystal Reports.
4. Discounted access to Peachtree on-line training videos, which can be useful for learning about routine Peachtree functionality, or “refresher training” on an infrequently used function.

Pricing for upgrade licenses, both with and without BusinessCare, is expected to be available next week. We will publish that information as soon as it becomes available.

Once important caveat for those who use Peachtree for Payroll processing: once your current tax table subscription expires, you will be required to purchase BusinessCare Gold to continue receiving payroll tax updates.

So, the “take away” from all of this is that, if you are interested in upgrading to Peachtree 2013, you are still able to do so without purchasing a BusinessCare subscription (unless you are using Peachtree for payroll). The choice is yours – for this year. This will likely not be the case next May, when the 2014 product is released.

Sage will continue to support the current edition and the two prior editions of the product when the 2013 product is released. Thus if you are using an edition of Peachtree earlier than 2011, you will no longer have support from the manufacturer a few months after the release of the 2013 product.

We will send out pricing information, including new features and pricing for our own TriStar Software License Insurance Plans during the first two weeks in April. First shipments of Sage 50 2013 Edition are slated for mid-May, with “pre-release” pricing available until that time.

The Sage “re-branding” initiative is not going away – Peachtree will still become Sage 50 U.S. Edition effective this May – but the transition to a “subscription only” sales model has apparently been shelved for this year.

The reseller webinar scheduled for today (March 19) was abruptly and unexpectedly cancelled late last week, and “unofficial word” from various Sage sources (after all these years supporting Peachtree, we do have a number of resources there!) is that 2013 upgrade licenses will not require a Sage BusinessCare subscription, at least for this year’s product release.

BusinessCare subscriptions will still be heavily marketed by Sage Direct Sales, and pricing for these subscriptions could be attractive for some users looking for this kind of support package (we think our own TriStar support package is a superior product, however). Existing Peachtree users who are interested in migrating to the new edition of the product will now have a choice, however, according to our sources.

So, if you were considering upgrading your product, but were discouraged by the Sage BusinessCare subscription requirement, you can now reconsider an upgrade to the 2013 edition, without any “strings” attached.

Another reseller webinar has been scheduled for Tuesday, March 27, at which time we are expecting to receive “official word” on the upgrade policy for the coming product release, as well as a final feature list and product pricing.

We will post another blog entry at that time, sharing this information as we receive it, and clarifying any remaining confusion (we hope!)

As most customers have heard by now, when Sage releases the next version of Peachtree in May, the product will be officially re-branded, from “Peachtree” to “Sage 50 – U.S. Edition”.

What has not yet been widely publicized, however, is another much more significant change to the “product formerly known as Peachtree”. Effective with the 2013 edition, the “Product” will only be sold via subscription. Customers either purchasing a new Peachtree –oops, Sage 50 – license, or upgrading their current product license, will be required to purchase a Sage BusinessCare subscription as a condition of licensing that new version.

The Peachtree consultant community has been told very little about this important transition so far, and we have no reliable information on future subscription pricing at this time. Sage has scheduled a special Peachtree reseller webinar for Monday, March 19, 2012 to provide details on this new direction for their popular accounting product, which many consider to be the “flagship” of the Sage accounting product line.

The Quantum version of the Peachtree product has been sold via a “subscription-only” model for the past few years now, and most of our clients have been satisfied with this approach. Quantum customers receive unlimited telephone support from Sage for technical issues, including remote access support when indicated, and automatically receive download notifications any time either a product update or a new product version becomes available. For these services Quantum customers pay a single “bundled” annual subscription fee, based on their Quantum license count.

For smaller businesses, this move to a subscription sales model could be perceived as a costly and unnecessary change to product licensing practices which have been in place for years. Part of Peachtree’s appeal to startups and small entrepreneurs over the many years of its existence has been its relatively low “cost of entrance” in comparison to the features set offered. This is about to change radically.

This change is not occurring in a vacuum, however. As technology moves ever more rapidly forward and broadband Internet access becomes ubiquitous in virtually all businesses, many software vendors – in addition to Sage – are transitioning to a subscription sales model from the more familiar licensing sales model. At this point many software companies are eliminating software license distribution entirely, and embracing a “cloud-based” approach to software delivery, via on-line subscription services with a monthly or annual fee for access. We suspect that Sage will be moving in this direction, as well, in the not-too-distant future.

We understand that Peachtree 2012 upgrade licenses will remain available for purchase by existing Peachtree customers at least until the release of Sage 50 – U.S. Edition 2013 in May. Presumably new users will also be able to purchase 2012 licenses, without a subscription obligation, until that time as well.

If you are not interested in transitioning to the new Sage subscription model for upgrading your accounting software when 2013 version ships, you still  have the option to purchase what is now the “current” edition of Peachtree (2012) without having to purchase a subscription, for a limited time. The “window” for non-subscription upgrade licenses, however, will likely close in the next 60 to 90 days.

As with all things Peachtree, please don’t hesitate to call TriStar at 610-941-2116 for advice on your Peachtree or other accounting software-related questions.

Peachtree “archives”, of both the home-brew variety and those created directly from within the program, have been around for some time. Of late however, we have been fielding more questions about them, as users find they need more generous access to financial data from closed fiscal years than Peachtree can provide.

In simple terms, a Peachtree archive is a “read only” snapshot, or copy, of your live database, as of the moment you create the archive.  In Premium and Quantum editions, the archive creation process can be run from directly within the software.  For Peachtree Complete, the user must “manually” create an archive outside of the application interface.

In Premium and Quantum, the “Archive Company” routine is available either from the File menu or as an option in the closing “wizard” when a year-end close is run.  The routine asks the user to give a name to the archive file (it defaults to a name which includes the current system date) when creating it. We recommend that you NOT accept this naming suggestion, but instead use something somewhat more descriptive, like “FY2010 before close”, or “pre-chart of accounts change”, or something that will help you find what you are looking for when you need to peek in the archives.

And the whole point of creating an archive is of course so you can return to it to look something up when needed. Let’s review how that works.

To open an archive, choose the File menu and select Open Archived Company.  Peachtree will then present you with a list of all of the archives that have been created for the particular live company from which you opened the list. If you are looking for an archive for a different Peachtree company, open that other live company first, then choose Open Archived Company.

The reason for this slightly confusing navigation scheme (for users with multiple Peachtree companies, anyway) is that the archives Peachtree creates are physically stored within the data folder that holds your live data, in a folder named “Archives”. You cannot choose where to create the archives, and when opening an archive you cannot choose what folder to look in. Peachtree will always and only look for an archive file to open from within the Archives folder within your company data folder.

Once you have opened a Peachtree archive, you can perform all of the normal lookup and  search functions, and run any reports for that company you may need for that particular time frame. The only thing you cannot do is change any of the data. The database and all of the tables within it are permanently stored in a “read only” state, removing the possibility of making changes to archival data (I good thing, in our opinion!).

Should you accidently move, damage, or destroy your archive database, you can restore it to its original location (so it can be opened) via the “Restore Archive” routine from the File menu. This will allow you to browse out to the location of the archive to be restored, and then restore it to the folder where Peachtree needs to house it in order to allow it to open.  It is important to note that this “restore archive” process does not restore the archive into your live data, or replace any live database. It only puts the archive file back where it belongs to make it usable again.

If you are using Peachtree Complete instead of Premium or Quantum, you will need to “manually” create your archive to replicate this product functionality. Basically, you will need to make a physical copy of your live database folder, give the copied folder a different name, and then change security settings on that copied database from within Peachtree to make the files “read only” for all users. This is definitely a “home brewed” solution, which does not offer all of the functionality of the Peachtree Premium and Quantum Archiving routine, but it does give you access to data and reports that would otherwise be inaccessible.

If you have questions or issues with creating and managing Peachtree database archives, give us a call at 610-941-2116 to see if we can help you figure out an archiving procedure that is right for your company.

We have compiled a simple one page handout for items to consider when completing your year end payroll processing, and when planning for the 2012 payroll tax year.

Please click here to read and/or download our PDF sheet containing useful payroll processing information.

Remember that we can provide all of the end-of-year forms you might require (W-2′s, 1099′s, etc.) at very competitive prices. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like a quote on forms, checks, envelopes, or whatever printed material you may need at this time of year.

Purging is the process of removing inactive Peachtree “list” data (i.e., customers, vendors, employees, items, jobs, general ledger accounts, etc.) and closed “transaction” data (i.e., quotes, invoices, purchases, payments, etc.) from the Peachtree database.

Since the key words are inactive and closed, prior to purging it is very important to make all list data that is to be removed (customers, vendors, employees, chart of accounts, inventory items, etc.) “inactive”, and all transaction data that is to be removed “closed” prior to running a purge. Contrary to what many Peachtree users believe, running a year-end close does not remove any data from the system; it merely “tags” transactions as belonging to a “closed” fiscal year, and also puts them into “read only” mode, making further editing impossible.

This can be problematic in that records that are not “closed” prior to running the year end close are stuck in the database, unable to be purged because they are not “closed” and unable to be closed because they are not in an open fiscal year. In this unfortunate “Catch-22” the best recourse is frequently an outside data repair service that can use developer tools to remove the “stuck” records.

Once you have determined the set of records to be purged, we recommend that you define a “purge sequencing strategy” to determine discrete, limited sets of records to purge over multiple passes through the Peachtree database. This is particularly important if the number of journal row records in your database exceeds 250,000 (you can check this within Peachtree by going to Help | Customer Support and Service | File Statistics, and scrolling down in the “Number of Records” column to check the size of the “Jrnl Row” table).

Quantum users can efficiently process a considerably larger volume of journal row records, but even for Quantum users we recommend purging when the volume of records exceeds 750.000.

A typical “purge sequencing strategy” would first seek to identify any transaction records older than 12 to 24 months prior to the first day of the earliest open fiscal period. Thus if your earliest open fiscal period were January 2010, you would be looking for records older than 1/1/2009 (or 1/1/2008 if you want to keep more records available).

To determine the oldest records in your system, open the transaction screen into which you enter the largest number of records (sales offers, vendor invoices, purchase orders, etc.), and click on the “List” button on the toolbar. Change the drop-down filter so that it shows “All Transactions” and note the date of the earliest record displayed in the list. That is your oldest transaction.

Do this same date lookup for each transaction type for which you want to perform a purge. With this information, it should be possible to establish a “phased” approach to transaction purges. If your earliest transaction date is April of 1999 (perhaps when you initially installed Peachtree) you might want to set three (or four, depending on transaction volume) distinct date ranges for the purge within each transaction type. Thus your sequencing might look like this:

Once you have removed all of the transactions that are no longer needed in the system, one or more additional iterations of the purge routine can be made, to remove so-called “list records” (customers, vendors, etc.) that have been tagged as “inactive”. If there are no transactions attached to these inactive records, they will be quickly and easily removed from the database.

Two additional items to consider prior to initiating a purge:

1. Consider creating an “archive database” prior to purging, so that all of the data you are about to remove from the system can still be easily accessed, in read-only mode, from the archive database;
2. After each successful step in the overall purge sequence, make a Peachtree backup of the database. Thus if your purge fails for some reason after Step #5, you will not have to start all over again from step #1. Thus seems blatantly obvious, and yet is all too often ignored. Peachtree backups are fast and easy to perform, and once the full purge is completed all of those interim backup files can be safely deleted.

We have performed hundreds of purges for clients, and when followed carefully these steps will never fail to produce the desired results (sometimes with the aid of a few additional tricks we have learned over the years!). If you feel squeamish about running a purge yourself, give us a call at 610-941-2116 to discuss your database maintenance needs and request a fixed price quote.

We may have stumbled upon a solution to a really obscure Peachtree problem that has plagued more than one of our clients. Thanks – and kudos – to Anthony Licate of Spidernet Technical Consulting for working through this one and coming up with a definitive solution.

Terminal Services has become a very popular vehicle for configuring remote computing environments, and most of the software applications we support at TriStar explicitly support Terminal Services. Peachtree is no exception to this. However, there are some very subtle but significant configuration settings which can seriously impact Peachtree’s performance in the terminal services environment. Emailing documents (via the Peachtree PDF Writer) is one of those areas.

Our client was consistently unable to email invoices through Peachtree when operating on the Terminal Server. The client was also experiencing periodic difficulties printing to her local printer when attempting to print to it through Terminal Services. Needless to say, this can get to be very annoying very quickly, and erode one’s confidence in the technology which allegedly facilitates this kind of remote access.

After much troubleshooting, we discovered that a somewhat obscure “group policy” setting in Windows Small Business Server 2008 was automatically “redirecting” any document sent to the My Documents folder on the Terminal Server over to the file server, which then ran afoul of the registry settings, or permissions, for Peachtree when attempting to email (or in some cases print) a Peachtree document.

Having diagnosed it, the fix was simple: turn off the group policy setting for this within Small Business Server. Voila! All Peachtree documents can now be emailed, and the sporadic printing issues have all disappeared.

If you are running on Small Business Server 2008 (or any other version of Server 2008 for that matter) check your “Group Policy” settings to make sure that you are not also an unwitting victim of “My Documents Redirection.”

Emailing invoices out of Peachtree is really very easy and convenient – but only if all of the technology is harnessed to work together.

Please let us know if you have also experienced emailing and printing issues in Terminal Server. We may be able to help you fix it.

TriStar has always stressed to clients the importance of backing up their Peachtree databases. Here are two recent examples of why this is important:

In attempting to run the Peachtree year end Wizard for a client, we received error messages pertaining to corrupted data. In attempting to restore a recent backup that was not corrupted we discovered that the last backup was nine days earlier, which only happened to exist because we were performing other work on their database at that time. We restored that database, and were then able to run the year end wizard without error, but the client had to re-enter all transactions for the nine days since that backup was made. If we had not made the backup nine days earlier, the next most recent backup was six months ago. Can you imagine the time and effort involved in re-entering six months of transactions?

Another client who converted to Peachtree in 2009 had never performed a backup. Due to a vendor import done incorrectly, all default general ledger expense accounts and vendor payment terms were inadvertently changed. Since the client had never performed a backup, a lot of effort was required to correct these vendor file errors.

With the release of Peachtree 2010, there is an Automatic Backup utility that allows automated database backups to be run as a service, unattended, outside of Peachtree, on a scheduled basis. This can be a bit technical to configure, but it is hardly rocket science, and once configured it will run without any further end-user attention required.

The only maintenance required by this helpful Peachtree feature is to manually remove older, obsolete backup files on a periodic basis. We generally recommend keeping only year-end and end-of-month backups, deleting all others not dated in the current month. Failure to perform this periodic maintenance can quickly fill up the destination drive for your backups, creating performance bottlenecks.

We recommend using the Peachtree Automatic Backup Service for all clients who are not already completely comfortable with managing their server-based backup systems. With the Automatic Backup utility there is no reason to not have a recent backup.

Please contact us for guidance on setting up this Automatic Backup utility along with instructions for doing manual backups and managing all backups.

Backup! Backup! Backup!