Has anyone else had this issue and what was the outcome? I went to cancel my Sage 50 subscription today. I have used Sage Accountant Plus for many years, but felt that it was becoming expensive particularly after forcing me to go to monthly subscription and renaming it Cloud50 Accounts.
I was told that it could be cancelled, but I would have no read only access to historic data.
I questioned this and said that before I was forced to go to monthly subscription I would have been able to see historic data. The reply was that by going to monthly I accepted the terms and conditions (which I have asked for a copy) which told me that once I cancelled I no longer had access to historic data.
I was also told that monthly HMRC reporting is why Sage forced me to go to monthly subscription.
I find this arrogant and wondered what others feel and whether anyone had received the same treatment?
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I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before.
I think your only option is to either do data dumps to Excel (or whatever) or physically print off the nominal activities in full for the last six years.
Printing isn't really viable, but a full nominal dump, whilst it will take some time, seems to be the best way really.
As above, dump it out.
Also your new software might be able to import a lot of the history. I haven't got rid of SAGE for a while (I avoid SAGE clients like the plague) but last time I got a client away from it and onto cloud we imported historical data.
Have you still got the old versions of Acc+ on disk media? Do CSV exports of data you require and import into your legacy version. The Audit Trail won't import certain types of transactions, but there are easy ways round this. I have an accountant client where we had to do this in reverse for about 50 companies, where he had a really old copy of Line50 and he needed to migrate to latest cloud version (Sage had no mechanism for doing this).
Currently being screwed over by them for a subscription cancelled last year. If Sage actually want accountants to act as their sales team, use their products and recommend them to clients, they could try acting with a bit of common decent business like conduct.
Their arrogance in the long run will cost them more in lost customers that they gain out of one subscription for something that has not been used and cancelled.
Apologies rant over
One of the issues becoming obvious with these cloud services is that they have no regard to a director's responsibility to retain records for the statutory period, despite knowing of the requirement (Sage even ask for a data retention period and reason why).
They 'allow' you to move to another provider but make it very difficult to drop/shift/upload whilst making no clear warning to the unwary of the consequential loss of access.
IMHO, they ought to be required, as a service provider akin to our profession, to give read only access for the minimum required statutory period at a nominal cost - say £25pa. to cover their hosting fees.
The ideal scenario would be an electronic dataset drop that could be transferrable. However, the fact they've all set up databases in their own image suggests this is pretty much a non-starter. I would even go so far as to opine that any third party wanting to offer a transfer service would not be given access to sufficient database architecture in order to protect the providers IP from skullduggery.
Thanks. I agree entirely. I have copied all reports and hold all csv data in Excel as well as backups, copy of ACCDATA, and full Audit trail in Excel. I believe they should offer a read only licence as any pre cloud software will not read the modified cloud files. So, although I have the Sage data I will not be able to read it once the cancelation has gone through.
Thank you for your thoughts.
Presumably you are moving to another software provider so you may be able to use Movemybooks or similar to import your historic data into the new software. If not, as others have said, you should run off the main reports and export the data. Make sure you keep hold of the backups as anyone with a licensed copy of Sage could restore it if necessary - if you had a VAT inspection, for example.
As regards not allowing you access if you stop paying, Xero do the same. But so do most of us. If a client of mine ceased being a client I'd stop working for him and I wouldn't expect him to keep coming back asking questions :)
That raises the question as to what happens a few years after cancellation. HMRC raise an investigation, would it be possible to pay the cloud provider (Sage in this instance) a fee for temporary access to the data, or will they have deleted it?
If it's Sage 50 Cloud, it has cloud functions but the data is held locally on your own PC or network. Sage (the company) doesn't store it. It's your responsibility to store the backup safely - not like a client many years ago who stapled their floppy disk backups to a backing board just to be sure!
Xero is all in the cloud. I've asked them the same question and they told me they hold the data for six years, even if you cancel the subscription. You can re-join any time and get access to historical records. Sage Business Cloud is entirely different to Sage 50c and data is all held in the cloud. I believe they have the same policy as Xero but common sense would say you check the exit route before you join.
