If you want to use the payroll module for anything other than reports of historical data, you will need to purchase a Payroll Subscription with a tier count equal to the number of unique employees processed every month through your Sage Account manager.
If you do not purchase a Payroll subscription with tier prior to 4/30/17 + 45 days grace period, you will be locked out of payroll (We are extending that date to 8/1/17 + 45 days grace very soon). After the expiration date plus the 45 days expiration you can have read-only access by installing the correct hotfix for the versions listed by searching knowledge article 82689.

I can answer other questions specific to your account if you email me directly with your account number. [email protected]

Hi Linda,
I have a customer reporting that all the screens in all the modules in all the companies have mysteriously changed color today. They are now black and very hard to read. Does this have something to do with them not responding to the payroll emails?
Thanks,
Cullen

I have not heard of anything like this happening. There is a 45 day grace period for the 4/30/17 expiration date so I doubt this is related.

Thanks Linda,
After a bit of research she received the new keys but has yet to input them into the system. We'll see if this changes after we do that.

Cullen, can you post a picture? It's not theme maintenance done badly, is it?

Cullen, can you post a picture? It's not theme maintenance done badly, is it?

Hi Wayne, *info - haven't thought of that in a while. What would that tell us re this issue?

Hi Rhonda, unfortunately she didn't have any screenshots and by the time I connected in today my workaround of using the Themes in Company Maintenance had resolved the initial issue of "black tasks".

Linda, and anyone else who's curious, I have as much info as I believe I'm ever going to have on what happened here, so I'll give you the full story as I now know it (funny what comes out in the wash, eventually, isn't it?):
What I don't know;
1. What the 'black screens' looked like other than the client reported they were very difficult to read.
2. Whether they were using Themes prior to this issue, I think they probably were.
What I discovered today;
A. 2 days ago, just before this started happening, another user there keyed in the new Payroll keys.
B. Any Themes that may have been in use were no longer setup in Company Maintenance.
C. They are fine now and using Themes to change the colors for each of their companies.

So originally the lady I spoke with thought Sage had pushed an update on her or otherwise did something to make her screens hard to read (some sort of punishment, perhaps, for ignoring all of those emails). It turns out someone manually put in the keys, but one question still remains as to whether inputting new keys will make changes to Themes in Company Maintenance.

Onward through the fog..