With Sage Accpac ERP 5.6 set to retire on July 1, 2014, many of you are in the midst of upgrading to Sage 300 ERP 2014, the latest version.
For this week’s blog post, we want to outline some upgrade best practices that should help make the transition from 5.6 to 2014 run smooth.
You can upgrade from 5.6 to 2014 directly. However, if you are running Sage ERP Accpac 5.5 or earlier, you cannot upgrade directly; you must first upgrade to version 5.6
Let’s breakdown the upgrade steps starting with…
Before you upgrade
- Read the compatibility guide
- Backup your data
Upgrade Preparation
- Before upgrading to Sage 300 ERP 2014, make sure that you are on the latest product update for Sage Accpac ERP 5.6. In this case, it would be Product Update 4.
- Make sure you have 2014 versions of all programs. This includes other programs you use with Sage 300 ERP such as third party solutions. You must upgrade all Sage 300 programs at the same time.
- Run Day End Processing if you have Inventory Control installed
- Post all open patches in Accounts Receivable and Payable
- Check Data Integrity and correct any errors
Upgrade Steps
- Backup, backup, backup your data
- Uninstall the previous version of System Manager. This ensures a clean install of Sage 300 ERP 2014.
- Install the Sage 300 ERP programs
- Install the latest Product Update. In this case, it would be Sage 300 ERP 2014 Product Update 1.
- Enter the license information
- Activate your data for version 2014 applications
Post upgrade
- Run Data Integrity for each module
- Run selected reports to confirm information is the same
- Backup the data
- For any custom applications, reports and macros, ensure they run as expected. For example, if you use Sage CRM, you may need to re-install the integration component.
Other things of note
If you used account groups in version 5.6 and you want to use these snapshots in Sage 300 ERP 2014, you may need to reassign some of your existing accounts to new account groups.
If you used account groups in Sage ERP Accpac versions 5.6 or 6.0 and you plan to use the general ledger snapshots, you must first:
1. Ensure that all account groups are assigned to an appropriate category from the new set of group categories. You can assign group categories using the Account Groups setup form.
2. Ensure that all general ledger accounts are assigned to appropriate account groups.
Also, if you’ve used account groups in version 5.6, note that in version 6.0, we modified the standard account groups that come with Sage 300 ERP. Therefore, you may need to reassign some of your existing accounts to new account groups, and assign the groups to the new group categories.
If you used Intelligence Reporting with Sage ERP Accpac 5.6 or 6.0, restore your customized reports and settings by copying the BXDATA folder (backed up before activation) to the Sage 300 ERP program folder.
If upgrading to Sage 300 ERP 2014 seem a bit daunting, then we recommend that you create a test environment so you can run a test upgrade
Before we leave off, here is an important tip: do not force through an upgrade but perform all the required steps found in the Upgrade Guide.
