I received an email from Sage today informing me that they will be disabling access to my software at the end of September. I bought a stand-alone copy (perpetual licence) of Sage 50 Accounts, V24, five years ago and have no issues with it and don't really need it updating. Apparently due to TLS 1.0 and 1.1 being out of date anyone using Sage software (stand-alone and cloud) older than version 26.2 will not be able to access it at this point. I'm facing having to bite the bullet and abandon Sage after almost 20 years, as I can't stomach the idea of paying Sage £145 per month for their offering. Xero or similar will probably be in my future...
The ideal situation would be to buy another perpetual Sage licence as then all my reports in Excel using ODBC will keep working. Can someone tell me if anyone is still selling stand-alone (ie non-subscription) Sage 50 software?
Thanks in advance.
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AFAIK ODBC will continue to work but that's not much comfort if the Sage program itself doesn't. You'll have no way of updating the data to be accessed by the read-only ODBC.
It wouldn't help you even if you find someone still selling stand-alone (i.e. non-subscription) Sage 50 software ... because the way in which the software performs is set by Sage (and, whatever their attempted justifications, this now involves stand-alone software 'dialling home' at which point Sage will stop it working)!
Read the full saga at https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/sage-50-cloud-wont-work-unle... ... and have your hanky ready to catch the tears.
"It wouldn't help you even if you find someone still selling stand-alone (i.e. non-subscription) Sage 50 software"
Surely if the software was v27 or v28 with TLS 1.2 embedded it would work. Not sure if perpetual licence versions are available for v27 or v28 though.
SJ Software might be worth a call as I came across a tweet from them advertising "Perpetual licences - Sage 50 Accounts Professional V27"
Unfortunately all these were sold a while back. I'll be going to other software based on this attitude of theirs even if I do have to take a monthly subscription with someone and it costs more (although Xero is looking substantially cheaper), Sage has demonstrated repeatedly that you are only of interest if you are paying way more than is necessary every month.
Sage are rip off merchants, they should be upgrading customers on perpetual licences for free to version 26.3
Yes, one would have thought that a significant number of perpetual licence customers eventually upgrade for one reason or another - just a matter of time. I have in the past. By forcing the issue they'll lose that potential future business because the customer will likely have moved to a different supplier in frustration with the poor treatment. If a core part of the software stops working they should either provide that same version but incorporating TLS 1.2 or, if that's not feasible because of the number of annual versions that would have to be revised, the earliest version that does incorporate TLS1.2, as a free replacement for the old version.
I was given a full refund of the price I paid for the perpetual license a couple of years ago plus a 6 month trial period on the new version, with no further commitment to use Sage software going forward. This was on the basis that the software was missold (i.e. 15 year license etc and their reasoning being clearly flawed). They should have patched it or provided a free upgrade to 26.3 but this is a halfway house that will allow me to transfer to another software package that hopefully treats their customers better.
Is the 'new version', which you are being allowed to trial, normally only available under their subscription model?
If so, the Sage's marketeers can tick the box on their list of targets (without caring about losing you as a client) ... but make sure that it's clear how you are going to be able to extract your data from (what is presumably) Cloud software.
There are some potential workarounds for the issue.
You could use TLS proxy or force .net to use a later version with a registry tweak.