90 Minds Community

Sage prepping for a payroll announcement for Sage 100 users ? I presume this is for Sage Payroll (outsourced payroll?) though it's not entirely clear. The marking on the literature does mention Sage 100. Note this is marked Sage Internal/Confidential so please don't re-distribute to customers or share anywhere publicly. I don't think I have any Sage 100 payroll customers looking to migrate to a subscription plan for $3,0000 a year. Perhaps there's more news coming on this or this is a price list for something to do with HR. via: MySageSell

There's also a document for Sage 300 which references an announcement to be sent 9/12/15

Long time Payroll users may complain, but they will pay as much or more moving to ADP or similar service. The risk is they may just decide to convert to another ERP.

You don't think this pricing is going to be attached to the new Sage 100 Payroll module, do you? It certainly looks like it is for the Payroll Service, but the fine print shows Standard and Advanced version availability. I don't have any customers using Sage Payroll Services now, so I do not know what type of integration there is nor do I know why there would be limitations for the Premium (SQL) version. Isn't it simply a journal entry or AP Invoice import?

I don't know. Am thinking that if this were pricing for the payroll service Sage would have trotted out a list of the features (filing taxes, forms for you). As of now my guess is that Sage intends to change pricing on their on-prem payroll for both Sage 100 and 300 and have the price tiered based upon numbers of users. If so, they're probably counting on some type of lock-in to keep users from leaving (ie - integrating payroll with JC or similar). Hopefully I'm wrong and we don't trade grandfathered unlimited users maintenance billing for grandfathered unlimited payroll users billing .....

I am interpreting this to be for their PR service, not the module. But then this is Sage....

I'm confused??

Just got that as well.

Here's the release. Love their spin.

FAQ http://www.slideshare.net/WayneSchulz/sage-100-payroll-pricing

Say hello to new unlocking key functionality. Seems as if you will need new keys to continue using payroll.

I thought it said if they don't go with the tier pricing, they wouldn't get PR or tax table updates but would still be able to use payroll. No?

From the FAQ: For existing customers with Payroll modules who do not enroll for payroll services as part of their plan, they will have use of their Payroll module, but will not have the benefit of the latest updates. Don't misinterpret this as EOL for Sage 100 Payroll (just Sage 100 Payroll updates).

This has to be one of the most confusing notifications ever and one of those head scratching things where people have been using this for years and all of a sudden they have not been ""fair

You know all that maintenance you paid for us to do the bare minimum legal requirements to payroll? Well we've decided it wasn't fair to our shareholders to have to actually do anything for that money...

Have I missed some math here - or do the costs at LEAST double? OLD Payroll $1,385 x .21 = $ 290.85 DD $1,050 x .21 = $220.50 Total annual maintenance = $511.35 I have more customers in the 31+, 51+ tier which means they see at least a 3x to 5x rate hike.

I would like to say ""I'm surprised"", but I am not. Typical Sage. How does this even make sense to anyone at Sage who has knowledge of how the Payroll module works?: ""...customers who are on a Sage Business Care Plan and using the Payroll module will only pay for the number of employees for whom they process payroll. We believe this approach is fair to all our customers. As an example, customers with 15 employees will no longer be paying the same price as a customer with 50 employees."" WTF??? Really? So, I've been processing payroll for hundreds of employees since 1988, faithfully paying my annual maintenance (business care plan) and NOW you have decided you are leaving money on the table? If I process payroll for 550 employees my annual business care plan for Payroll plus Direct Deposit has been approximately $500. Under the new pricing, you are increasing my annual business care tenfold to $5,000? Holy Sh*t!!! Are you freaking kidding me??? Please tell me I am reading this wrong. Why does Sage insist on sh*tting on small businesses? The arrogance of these people makes me want to puke.

@BrianRice - how true your final statement is.

What's interesting is that during Sage's earnings event (I forget which one) they said they'd like to rely less on price hikes for revenue growth. This announcement really screws people with integrations to Sage who have far fewer options than people who are using Payroll but aren't integrated.

More details - did you see the information about Direct Deposit 2.0 on page 4 of the FAQ? According to Sage, your bank will not charge you to process direct deposit transactions because the new direct deposit service will ""trigger the required bank transactions automatically."" I'm not going to pretend that I know what my bank will or will not charge for direct deposit, but I'm thinking most banks charge for the convenience and not necessarily because they have someone push a button to run these transactions.

I'm not sure what Sage is saying here. If I were to guess they are going to have some type of service similar to taxes where you upload your money to some account they control then transfer the money electronically - but that's just a WAG on my part.

Is it unrealistic to say that a partner could pull together the required tax tables and export them for import at all their customers without using the Sage subscription service?

Probably not - what happens with ACA? All of the W2 forms now go through Aatrix which requires a subscription plan. I will be curious if Sage locks down ability to edit tax tables via the new keys

What a can of worms! I'm gonna have a number of clients scrambling for options this last quarter of the year. And our clients still need access to defining their Local Payroll Taxes...

Sage HRMS Payroll for 300 EE is $1770.30 (for now). Did we just get leverage for an HRMS sale or a warning to steer the end-user away from the software publisher they've been with for 14 years?

@GaryFeldman - I was thinking the same thing. @WayneSchulz - It is possible to populate Aatrix via spreadsheet exported from Payroll without being on Sage maintenance.

I wonder how many Sage customers only stay on maintenance only for payroll reasons...Sage may be pointing an AR15 at their feet here...

Seasonal employers may have fluctuations from as low as 20 employees during their slow time to over 300 during their busy times. Now they will be saddled with maintaining keys every time they ramp up and then remembering to maintain again when it slows up again. Notice that Sage will remind you to pony up when your EE count goes up but they don't remind you when the count goes back down. Amazing.

What happens if you have multiple companies under a corporate umbrella, and you have multiple EIN's. Currently with AATRIX each company has to have an account to print the W-2's. Would each entity be required to pay the new tier or would it apply to the licensed company as it does now?

I can't wait to tell one client that their maintenance is going up $5,000 per year.

@LloydSmith has a great question - what about sites with multiple companies where each company does payroll. I have a staffing company in just that situation. I wonder if they have to license payroll separately for each tax ID.

As I said early on in this discussion, ADP and Paychex will cost substantially more than even the top tiers here. As soon as customers get quotes, they may just pay up to Sage. For 500+ employees, those services could cost $24,000+ per year.

That doesn't make the practice right or ethical or justify the lack of advance notice that Sage provided to their customers. Remember Sage is ""The champion of small business"". Over time I think you'll see payroll migration in the same way Sage customers have migrated away from Sage Payments. At some future meeting Sage will ponder ""why our competitors say bad things"" or how ""partners need to be team players"". The Sage EVP's pondering will be three generations away from the current regime. And like Charlie Brown running up to the football held by Lucy - the remaining channel will be wildly impressed that ""this new regime"" really gets us..... I for one am curious to watch and see the impact.

Well, my excitement from the ""we will bring payroll to the new business framework"" that I heard from Deborah Nelson just turned to anger and distrust. Sure, Sage didn't lie to us, but they were disingenuous at best. @JohnHoyt - I agree with you that the third party options will be more expensive. However, QB is not. I am certain that some users will purchase QB to run payroll. Or, they will purchase some other in-house payroll solution.

...and the reason we had a PRIVATE partner only ""Road Ahead"" at Sage regarding Sage 100 was ?

I just talked with one client with 4 companies using Sage 300 payroll for a total of 1,200 employees. He looked at last years renewal for payroll, direct deposit and Aatrix efile and his bill was $1,518.90. Now it will be $5,000. In his words, ""I guess Sage doesn't value us as a customer

Here's another ""what if"" that will hopefully be clarified on the partner webcast Friday. If the 4 companies that Lloyd mentioned each have at least 261 employees but less than 501 employees, will Sage charge $3,000 per company (Federal Tax ID)? Anybody want to place any bets???

@BrianKelly - what partner webcast for Friday? Can someone send me a link?

@PeterWolf http://tinyurl.com/prss34u

Is this partner webinar (in conjunction with their terrible announcement practices) the reason this hasn't been taken to the Sage Partners, Employees & Alumni Networking Group on LinkedIn? Nobody is going to confuse me with someone willing to give Sage the benefit of the doubt but they've got no representation in this group. There is no voice to answer our questions.

Sage essentially gives us a two word answer each time we ask about better collaboration. One hint - the words aren't happy birthday.

Preparing a quote for a prospect. Maintenance cost at purchase will be $1500. Next year will be $5000. Yipees. Makes Sage 100 a harder sell. I don't really want to suggest a different payroll system since many prospects are looking for integration and if they have to use a different payroll, why not use a different system altogether.

Stephen Kelly is Mr Social Media. You would hope his attitudes would start to percolate down to the Regional OpCos like North America and his team would be encouraged to engage on social media.

I feel like I'm hearing the French pronunciation of ""focus"" again.

Maybe that should be the theme of MOTM -- ""Focus Part Duex

The song that has played in my head after every Sage announcement: ""Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"" I think I now understand the point of the repetitive synth part in that song...

Just spoke with my RAM and she said Sage was surprised by the backlash (imagine that) and they are considering changes. She also suggested providing feedback on the Friday call.

My RAM said he just saw the price sheet last week. He didn't have anything to say about it. He is in survivor mode still

Page 215 of the Sage Playbook: ""When confronted with negative comments it is best to (a) reply that you are surprised at the negativity --- because everyone else BUT the complainer loves the change and (b) say you are considering changes. It's important to note that consideration in no way should ever result in actual change. In a large group setting, some staff have good luck using large sheets of paper to gather suggestions. Please be advised it is against corporate policy to bring the sheet of paper back to the office or carry the paper out of the meeting room.

I have to put together a quote for a prospect including payroll. It'll be interesting to see what my sales advisor comes up with.

@ThereseLogeais , it will probably include ""if they can close this month....

So I had a discussion with our RAM while placing an order and I asked about the pricing when there are multiple companies running payroll under the same site but each company has it's own EIN and Aatrix account. He didn't know the answer but he did tell me that the RAMs were given the new pricing on Friday, Sage was going to notify the clients next week about this and then the VARS would have been notified in October when additional information was to be released to the channel. He did say the internal call was interesting because a certain group of people were very much against this when they asked for talking points on the price increase but no valid points were provided. So now I'm wondering if this price increase was shared or discussed with the BPAC group?

@LloydSmith , do I read this correctly that your RAM didn't expect the channel partners to receive this news until October (nearly two weeks after the end users)? Sounds like someone was responsible for getting this information to the channel partners early.

@BrianRice Yes you are correct. That's what he told me. When that was discussed on the internal call last Friday @ Sage, several people spoke up and thus we were provided with the information this week.

Focus: Part Deux ... indeed.

For those customers who do not want to comply and move to a payroll service, does that fit the definition of ""forced migration""?

@LloydSmith Yes, this was shared with the BPAC last Friday, but Sage did not indicate the announcement was coming out so soon on Monday. At least we didn't have to keep this under wraps for long. It was like an after thought they decided they probably should discuss with the BPAC. We gave our feedback, but I sense it made little difference.

So they reformed the BPAC not to consult or listen to it.... AGAIN?

Well, it sounds like it is time to ""go to the mattresses"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB8xPnhpzAM Or if you like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_5IZ3CZ248 I am going to survey my clients today to get an idea of the impact of this change for them. Then encourage them to send an e-mail to Sage management expressing their dismay/anger/frustration about taking it in the shorts. Does anyone have some e-mails of senior management that I could pass along. Since it appears that they don't care about what the reseller thinks, it is time ""to go to the mattresses"".

I would say this should be classified under ""wait and see"" as to whether the BPAC opinions will be taken seriously. At the 2-day meeting, Sage management acted as if they were. This payroll announcement, however, was not handled well, and seems to be something that has already been decided, where no comments from the BPAC nor the channel will prompt any changes. I'd like to be proven wrong on this.

Comment from one of my CPA firms regarding the price increase. ""If they don't do something for accounting firms, it looks like QuickBooks will be adding a lot of business"" From other clients Thanks. I'm going to get some quotes from some payroll service companies. $4,000 just for the payroll module?? Just ran some quick #'s our business online banking fee is $20.00 and that gives us unlimited file uploads. I'm not counting that fee in the calculation because we will still pay that for the A/P ACH service. 75 employees x 52 weeks x .08 = $312.00 which is the annual $ amount we're paying with the current system. $510 + 312 = $822. You can imagine how thrilled I am that their new feature which will allow us to save the $312 will only COST us an additional $1678 per year! Even if they threw in FREE electronic filing of quarterly, annual, W-2 it still wouldn't be cost effective.

QuickBooks should be credited with record profits for CPAs - it requires them to more carefully review the postings in case someone is embezzling - more chargeable hours.

Another client doing ciphering on her own...... Just ran some quick #'s our business online banking fee is $20.00 and that gives us unlimited file uploads. I'm not counting that fee in the calculation because we will still pay that for the A/P ACH service. 75 employees x 52 weeks x .08 = $312.00 which is the annual $ amount we're paying with the current system. $510 + 312 = $822. You can imagine how thrilled I am that their new feature which will allow us to save the $312 will only COST us an additional $1678 per year! Even if they threw in FREE electronic filing of quarterly, annual, W-2 it still wouldn't be cost effective.

I assume everyone got the e-mail about the delay in deployment... I got a good chuckle

Which will now constitute ""We listened to the partners and altered our plan accordingly.

Regardless, it's still not really enough time for clients to make any plans.

Oh come on,isn't the answer clear for most small businesses? Stop paying maintenance, don""t upgrade, maintain the tax table manually. Maybe in 3 years pay back maintenance when you need to replace your server. They will likely have a win back promotion and you will have saved you cash until necessary. Or you could just switch systems at that time....

Whether you like the new terms or not, we need to get our stories together with valid investment and feature comparisons plus alternatives, so we can intelligently communicate with our Payroll customers. I am glad we were given the extra time to do this. We are in a much better position if we proactively do this before the Sage communication goes out to customers.

The wording of the announcement ""based upon valuable partner feedback requesting more time to fully understand all the details of the payroll tier changes prior to notification of customers"" made me feel as if Sage was implying that the partners are dummies because we ""don't fully understand"". Oh yes we do. But obviously Sage doesn't.