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Remote Data Access is to be avoided at all costs

Please heed this as a warning for anyone considering using Remote Data Access.

If you value your data in any way, then please, for the love of everything sane DO NOT use it.

Now I will say, the program itself offers some good features. I especially like the invoicing and VAT management side of things. My issues are solely related to remote access.

Let me explain in detail.

First off, a little background on myself.

I worked in various roles of systems analysis and software development for approximately 20 years. This does not mean i know 'everything', but I know more than sufficient in what I will discuss.

In recent years I moved into acquiring tech businesses I saw potential in.

Just over a year ago, I took over a small business the develops android apps.

They use Sage 50 Accounts for their invoicing, VAT and bank management.

Four employees work from the main office and three work remotely.

I immediately learned of nothing but issues the employees have experienced ever since they started using Remote Data Access.

The performance is abysmal and causes nothing but delays in processing day to day activities.

It seems the performance issue scales with each remote user.

If only the office workers are logged in, no issues.
One remote worker logs in, things start to slow.
With each remote worker, it gets worse with locking and sync issues.

Prior to taking over this business, I was a stranger to Sage's products, but was very aware of the company. My impressions were they are a strong market leader in this area and have, what I had heard to be, a good track record with ledger software.

A couple of the employees had already dealt with Sage support at great lengths to resolve the problems.

By Sage's standard we have a small data set. The slowest connection for a user is 200Mb fibre and the office runs on a 1Gb network.

Everything else running on the network is lighting quick.

I decided to have a dig around on the network and relevant machines to examine exactly what is happening as best I could.

Now, after some research about the history of Sage 50 Accounts, I learned it is still using a flat file database. This was a little surprising given the downfall of that database type is concurrent access inefficiencies and I was fully expecting an SQL database to be in use. However, I didn't think too much of it to start with.

I spent a few days examining network traffic in the office, Sage's activity and then logged in remotely to the home sites to examine the same.

Then the penny dropped and I thought "No, this cannot be the case!?".

I quickly called support to see if they could verify my suspicions and they unfortunately did.

The only valid use of the word 'remote' for Remote Data Access is the fact someone outside of the office can access the data.

The data is NOT hosted at all.

Instead, each location has its own local copy of the database and they are constantly fighting between each other with read/write requests.

This is absolutely the worst possible thing you can do with a flat file database. It already isn't great for concurrent access, but having four copies of it remotely syncing between each other is insane.

Expecting this implementation to work is like expecting a house of cards to remain standing during an earthquake. It’s asking for problems, plain and simple.

No wonder it is constantly dropping out of sync every 20-30 mins while everyone is logged in.

There is no technology is existence that will be make this work efficiently.

What was the cherry on the top was the fact this business used a hosted version of the same software that was a service offered by Sage.

That's right, Sage used to host it remotely on servers for customers. Apparently, other than the occasional bit of file locking, it worked quite well.

Hosting this type of database is the ideal solution for this product. Whichever bright spark decided Remote Data Access was a better idea needs a serious reality check.

Enough was enough and I decided a different solution was needed.

We have a decent server, so I thought RDS surely must be a better solution.

After adjusting the setup, we haven't had a single issue since.

The program and database is sat on the server where everyone accesses it either locally , or remotely.

It is so frustrating to think, this is almost exactly what Sage used to offer customers and instead they migrated to a woefully unreliable and inefficient alternative.

So there you have it. If you want to use Sage 50 Accounts remotely, DO NOT use Remote Data Access. Use a decent VPN and/or an RDS enabled server and do it yourself.

Alternatively, there are companies offering a hosting service specifically for Sage 50 Accounts.

I hope these words will save people having to go through these issues.

JD

Parents
  • This was a really interesting read. We have had very similar issues which have got worse.  I have used RDA in small companies where Sage 50 is the accounts function however as soon as stock control comes in staff are chucked out of Sage with syncing issues all the time.  Will look at changing remote users to a VPN and remote desktop.

Reply
  • This was a really interesting read. We have had very similar issues which have got worse.  I have used RDA in small companies where Sage 50 is the accounts function however as soon as stock control comes in staff are chucked out of Sage with syncing issues all the time.  Will look at changing remote users to a VPN and remote desktop.

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