Hi Francesca,

Thanks for using Community Hub

We've got a feature comparison guide that gives an indication of what's available and what isn't between Sage 50 Payroll and Sage Payroll that may help. It's available here : Sage payroll software feature comparison >

I'd add regarding the servers that we don't test Sage 50 Payroll using online data storage, so performance of the software couldn't be guaranteed using an online server. I'd advise against this configuration, I appreciate this isn't the ideal for your scenario, but Sage 50 Payroll would require either data on the C drive as it is, or on a local server which is understandable if you'd need to rule out.

Regards,

John Howells
Sage UKI

Thank you John, that guide was really handy and definitely help me to decide that the cloud package is not for us.

My IT Company have asked if SharePoint would be considered as an alternative? What are the risks with storing the data/programme on a cloud/online server? If we were to back up the data after each use to a local drive hopefully we wouldn't lose any data if the worst happened?

Thanks in advance.

Francesca

No problem Francesca, great to hear it helped 

I'd advise against using Sharepoint to host the data. The issue is that Sage 50 Payroll uses a database file for the majority of your payroll data for each company, named Payroll.MDB. Sage 50 Payroll writes to this file when you use the software, and if this is done over an internet connection then the speed of the connection impacts the software's ability to write to this file.

If the program is used over a local network, for example to a server, we recommend network speed of 1 Gbps as a minimum. This is confirmed in the Network spec section of the System requirements for Sage 50 Payroll guide. Most internet connections are slower than this, but even if you had a connection that fast, there's no guarantee against dips in speed at the time when Sage 50 Payroll is writing to the payroll.MDB file. 

The risk at a minimum would be slow/poor/unstable performance which would likely make it difficult to use the program, but the bigger risk would be corruption of the payroll.mdb file, potentially rendering it unusable. You could reinstate a working payroll.mdb by restoring a backup, but you'd lose any work since the backup was taken, and this issue may keep occurring.

Will you and your colleague be working on computers in the same office? If the two computers were in the same building on a local network (without a server) your IT may be able to share the payroll company data location with the second computer over the network. Then with Sage 50 Payroll installed on each computer, you could both access the data held on one computer. The downside of this though would be the computer holding the data would need to be kept on for the second computer to access the data - if it was shut down the second computer couldn't access the data.

As another option, you could both have the data on your local C drives, and restore backups between each computer. This would mean you couldn't both work on the payroll at the same time, but you could then still cover sickness/holidays and process on your computer that way. You'd just need to be careful to ensure that only one person ever works on the payroll at a time, and that if either of you make any changes, then send a new backup for the other to restore before the other makes any changes. Not an ideal solution, but thought it was worth adding!

One last point is that to install and use the program on more than one computer you'd need a multi user licence. If you already have this then there's no action to take, but if you have a single user licence you can leave your details on this form, and we'll be in touch to discuss upgrading that.

Thanks,
John