Sage 50 Maintenance and Repair

Sage 50 has two somewhat “routine” maintenance tasks built into the application, and a couple of “under the hood” tools for performing not-so-routine maintenance to the database.

Because Sage 50 is – at present – limited to 24 open periods, users will periodically (as in every year) need to “close” a fiscal year in order to free up twelve additional fiscal periods to hold next year’s transactions. Contrary to what many users believe, closing a fiscal year does NOT remove any records from the system; it merely marks the closed records as “read only”, disabling any editing of these transactions. Those transactions are still accessible for viewing, and can be included on SOME – but not all – system reports.

The second “routine” maintenance task is the record “Purge” function. Unlike the year end close, this task DOES physically remove transactions from the database. Users will typically need to perform a purge when the number of transaction records stored in the database begins to adversely impact system performance. Our benchmark indicator for performing a purge is the number of records in the Journal Row table.  Depending on the “flavor” of Sage 50 you are running (Complete, Premium, or Quantum) a purge MAY be indicated when your Journal Row table contains more than 250,000 records (for Complete and Premium) or more than 750,000 records (for Quantum). There is a utility in the software for reviewing the number of records in each database table. Call us if you need help finding this.

Starting with the 2013 edition of Sage 50, the application has embedded some additional tools in the menu structure for more strenuous database maintenance.  The Sage 50 Integrity Check is a series of utilities for reindexing records and reconciling “master record” balances (stored in summary) to itemized transaction record totals. This utility should NOT be used lightly or without cause; it has been known to cause record damage in some instances.

When all else fails, there are some trusted developers around the country who have built a successful business out of repairing or otherwise reconfiguring Sage 50 and Peachtree databases, when the built-in tools fail to fix a problem. We have worked with a few of these companies for years, and have found them to be reliable and trustworthy with your data. Repair services are not inexpensive, but when faced with a non-functional accounting database, repair may be a more realistic option than starting over from scratch and manually rebuilding years of information.

If you find yourself in need of advanced maintenance or repair services, give us a call to discuss your situation. We have helped hundreds of companies recover damaged databases, and we might be able to advise you on the best path to repairing yours.