General Consultant Discussion

Can you explain what this means @ShawnSlavin ? I expect that it is notice that Sage Abra Suite is discontinued in favor of Sage HRMS? What's the difference?

I have a client running the FoxPro version of Abra Suite 7.8 (off-plan, of course), so I'm hoping this can be an incentive to get them back on-plan and upgraded.

1. Are these different products? 2. Same Mom and Dad or is this something (HRMS) Sage bolted together to replace Sage Abra Suite 3. Why is Sage Abra Suite going away? 4. Any missing features/gotchas moving from Sage Abra Suite to Sage HRMS? 5. Any added features moving from Sage Abra Suite to Sage HRMS?

Not sure what your confusion is Wayne? Paschal spent several years and tons of cash on rebranding so that users (and resellers??) would NOT have this confusion...... @ShawnSlavin certainly has forgotten more than I will ever know but it is my understanding that MSFT has dropped support FoxPro so that users are going to have to migrate at some point. Other that HRMS having a SQL database (which was available in Abra), the differences are similar to those of MAS 90 and Sage 100 Std. There aren't many......

We picked up HRMS, partly because Chuck had earlier, substantial experience with Abra. While the HRMS part is similar to Abra Suite, Payroll is completely different -- and an acquired taste for a consultant. Chuck might add some details later, but in our opinion, HRMS is hands down a far better product for customers to go forward with. The SQL foundation is a substantial part, but also it just has more flexibility. This is not a simple rebranding; they are quite different. Also, most of the new feature development is going into HRMS. One problem that Sage has is that HRMS is really hard for many current Abra consultants to learn. The SQL element is a hurdle for some. Partly because of this, Sage is having problems getting its customer base to upgrade. At this point it is in danger of being in the worst of both worlds, where a substantial part of its customer base is mad at the product (Abra) because it doesn't know how different HRMS is.

@WayneSchulz, Sage Abra Suite was developed in FoxPro back in the 1980's by then parent company, Abra Cadabra Software. In the late 1990's, Epicor who at that time owned the accounting package Platinum, decided to shelve their payroll module. They cut a deal to give every one of their customers that owned the Platinum payroll module a free copy of Abra Cadabra payroll. In the early 2000's, Abra Cadabra combined with the company who published FAS and changed their name to Best Software. Shortly thereafter, Sage purchased Best Software as part of their publisher buy-up spree under Ron Verni. Not too long after this, Sage purchased the Platinum for Windows product from Epicor. Abra Suite is a very feature rich HRMS system and over time, the product moved into larger and larger customer sites. However, the database backend proved to be a limiting factor in processing payroll for companies with more than 2,000 to 3,000 employees. While this group of customers was small relative to the overall customer base, it was VERY profitable for Sage. It became apparent that a SQL alternative was required to work with larger shops and to compete in more technical IT shops. When Microsoft announced the end of life for FoxPro in the the mid 2000's, the writing was on the wall that Sage had to come up with a replacement to Sage Abra that would survive the eventual failure of FoxPro. Microsoft discontinued FoxPro in January 2010 and stopped extended support in January, 2015. Sage started trying to develop a SQL alternative to Sage Abra over 12 years ago. After several false starts, they finally built a SQL version of the HR module that pretty much mirrors the HR module in Sage Abra. However, re-writing the payroll module proved to be bigger than the company was ready to invest in. Rather than build from scratch, they selected the payroll module from Sage 300 (AccPac) as the base for a new SQL payroll module to integrate with the SQL HR system. Over the past 7 years, the HRMS team has worked to integrate the two products, enhance the payroll module to fill feature gaps between it and Sage Abra Payroll, and to bring additional Abra Suite modules forward to SQL. Today, the Sage HRMS suite has the same or greater feature set as Abra Suite. However, it is not a direct replacement to Abra Suite. The conversion of an HR only customer from Abra to Sage HRMS is a pretty straight forward process as a high percentage of the SQL product was based on Abra Suite. However, the migration of Abra Suite Payroll customers to Sage HRMS is like migrating from Sage 100 to Sage 500. They share commonalities in name and do the same basic things (payroll) but that's where the similarities end. Sage has been reluctant to announce the end-of-life for Abra Suite for several reasons. The two most significant are that over 70% of the Sage HR division customer base is still on Abra Suite and Sage really didn't have a conversion methodology to move Abra Suite payroll customers to Sage HRMS, The issue was so significant for us that we developed our own tools to migrate customers from Abra to HRMS. Sage has finally created their own tool set for basic migrations and are beginning the push to move customers off Abra Suite. To date, Sage has not set a target date for the end-of-life for Abra Suite. However, we believe that it is only a matter of time and statistics before they do. I hope this helps.

Chuck calls the HRMS Payroll ""Frankenpayroll"" because it clearly part ACCPAC and part Abra (sorta). It is a VERY different beast from Abra payroll. We agree with Shawn that it is the big hurdle in conversions.

Thanks - great background!

We actually have a lot of information on why someone should upgrade. We have a section of our website dedicated to it. While the site has a marketing and sales focus, it is also educational. I'm not trying to sell here, just share information. Do with it as you will. http://www.cs3technology.com/sage-hrms-migration-hotspot.html

@ShawnSlavin tells the tale of an investment holding company that purchased assets in the software industry. In only 12 years Sage has not solved a single problem, but created a parallel set of functionality that is more expensive and less popular than the asset it purchased. Companies/people that have not diversified from Sage are holding out for retirement or ???