Sage 100

Planning question: company processes payroll every Wednesday and transmits the ACH file manually to their bank. What if the new internet-based tax calculation service goes down? They have a very small window. They are worried (understandably) about moving forward and are considering dropping Sage. Is there no way to run off last week's tax tables. They have one state, and the rates never change. Ideas?

Have a copy on the programs on a laptop and go to Starbucks to calculate the taxes.

Good question. I have companies in remote locations with sketching internet. And what if Sage goes down? But that wouldn't happen, would it?

Exactly, there are two points of potential failure with no alternate course of action.

If it takes too long, run the payroll with manual taxes based on previous payroll checks, and move on. Not sure what 'transmit ACH manually to bank' means, unless they are driving it to the bank, but that risk is inherent with any internet type event. They all need to have a backup plan. There is still Schedule E isn't there to look up the taxes and key them in? Not arguing that it would be nice to have a backup program available.

@NancyHanson they are more concerned about Sage being up not them. In the cases where they had no internet connection, we used an Access database and VI to import the net checks into AP. Painful, but got it done in time to pass out checks Friday am.

I believe the real issue is our confidence in Sage. Our customers and us have learned over the years to work around shortcomings with the software. Payroll is always a big concern. If you can't pay employees because of software problems, the software will be replaced. Unfortunately, I believe it comes down to our trust that Sage will be able to have a stable payroll system with 100% up time. There are a lot of companies that run web based software for their entire business and they expect 100% up time, or very close to 100%. Sage has done little to give us confidence in them.

This seems like a good question to post on Sage City, to get an official public answer to a very legitimate concern.

@KevinMoyes I agree. Especially since it seems Sage never runs these major changes past Advisory Board or major resellers. I'll never try to second-guess Sage as that would certainly lead to my being committed to the asylum but I'll ask anyway. What good purpose is served in moving tax table updates to a cloud based service? Sage never installed the TTUs for us so there is no labor savings there. Now this implies that tax tables are updated as soon as adopted by regulators - so that seems more labor intensive. This will surely negatively affect PR support too. Just saying...

The Sage City question isn't as much hoping for an answer, but to shame them into creating a solution to the problem. I'd be surprised if they had properly thought this critical point of failure through, and talking to someone in private is easy to ignore, but a public thread on their flagship forums expressing a real concern... is harder to sweep under the carpet. (Especially if many voices chime in to echo the concern, publicly). I'm not the right person to do that though... PR doesn't work in Canada.

The closest cousin to this might be Sage Exchange. There have been limited extended outages. I'm not all that concerned about the tax table service. If payroll is mission critical it's probably best they outsource it. Speaking of which, isn't the Sage outsourced payroll awfully quiet?

@KathrynScofield I believe the cloud tax tables are or will be shared by multiple Sage payroll programs. The saving is they don't have to deal with compatibility issues, or creating installation routines for ten different systems.

Is ANYTHING truly safe?? A local network is safe until the domain controller takes a dump and brings the company down for a week. Happened to my client last month. They missed their ACH deadline and had to print checks after I loaded Sage on a local workstation. Luckily, they had a good backup. BTW, they have a new IT manager. How many of you have had clients call saying Sage was acting funky. Whoops, cryptolocker!!!! I know a company that had their server hacked and they were down for over a week. They moved to a hosted solution only to lose access to their data for nearly two weeks when their cloud provider was severely hacked. There were threads here in SC about that mess! Yes, it is a valid concern with the tax tables in the cloud. One hopes that Sage has several redundant data centers scattered throughout North America. Perhaps there SHOULD be an option to download tax tables as a back up. But as @WayneSchulz states, if PR is mission critical, outsource it and let someone else worry about getting checks in the mail. I would like to see the fine print in the EULA regarding Sage's liability if the system goes down. I bet it is minimal. @KathrynScofield - perhaps you should gently suggest that your client go to a biweekly PR which would give them several extra days for processing. And a biweekly payroll would probably save money by reducing the processing by half. We **should** hold Sage's feet to the fire on this one. MOTM 2018 is an excellent time to do it.

@JeffSchwenk when I was a controller, I fought hard to drop weekly payroll but was humbled when I was made to understand that many of the employees made so little that they cashed their paychecks at the grocery store and used half to feed their family. The factory workers lived from paycheck to paycheck without a safety net. Scary. Believe it or not, that factory was Peachtree Software's production facility making and assembling diskettes and user manuals (remember those?).

It is a hard knock life out there. My second job was bagging groceries and back in the day we were paid in cash every Friday. But when faced with challenges, we need to challenge ourselves to think differently. A bi-weekly PR is such a thought.

regarding bi-weekly PR, when a large company like Boeing went to bi-weekly payroll, they paid every employee a second week of payroll, up front, before the change. Then for the next 5-pay periods, they deducted 1-days worth of Pay. Probably been 20-years now since that happened. It can be done when the employer wants to do something to save money, while protecting the employees from the ""hard knock life"".

I'm going to have a conversation with the client about bi-weekly and see where it goes. Thanks @MadelineStefanou for a solution to the transition issue.

To address another, but related issue, do you have suggestions for time clock hardware and software? Interface to PR Data Entry would be nice.

Several of my clients are on Time Clock Plus. @HaroldWestover can tell you more about it.