Sage 100

I talked to Sage support yesterday about the payroll tiers and expiring 4/30. Sharing what I know... Customers who don't have updated keys (meaning they still show 4/30 as their PR expire date) will get locked out of the payroll module completely the next time it goes to reach out to Sage's server (after 4/30). He said the only way you can keep a backup/historical copy from reaching out to sages server and locking up is to put it on a machine that doesn't have internet. If the customer is on an old enough version that it doesn't list a PR expire date in *info then it shouldn't be able to lock them out. They just would be unsupported by Sage for any issues. He said Sage 100 is going to be tracking the number of unique employee IDs during tax calc. It keeps a list of employee IDs (that never resets) and compares against that during tax calc to see if you are over your tier. This counts for all companies so if you run tax calc as a test in a backup company (or run PR out of multiple companies) those will get added to the same ongoing list and counts each unique employee ID. He did say that if you fire someone and then hire someone it's ok and not going to count as extra. When I asked how it knows if someone is fired so we make sure to flag them correctly he said he doesn't know as its all on the programing side. I guess I would think employees need to me marked as terminated. As you know it then prompts them that they have a certain number of days to contact Sage to get on a higher tier. They are keeping track of how many times someone goes over their tier, etc. I'm planning on doing some due diligence and making sure our customers show the correct PR expire date (and tier level) in *info before 4/30 to keep everyone moving. I know some levels will automatically install the latest keys but we all know those can be messed up.

Sure hope Sage has extra payroll tech support on April 1. This has the makings of a catastrophe.

April 1? First it's a Saturday and second, thankfully, it's a Saturday because April Fool's Day is a terrible date to launch anything. I suppose they had to pick a non-quarter start/end date though.

It is May 1, not April 1.... my typo.

Is the expiration date automatically set when the unlocking keys are entered? Or does Sage write back to the app?

The expiration date is coming from the unlocking keys BUT the expiration date itself can't lock them up. It has to pull the new keys that exclude PR mod to lock them up. That's why it doesn't lock up until the next time it goes to reach out to the Sage server after 4/30. Obviously it would also lock up if someone manually enters the updated keys. I saw the Evernote post that lists what versions are doing the auto-update of keys: 2015.5+, 2016.2+, 2017.0+.