Year End 2020

Question

What is the oldest version of Sage 300 CRE you can have to run year end processes correctly including W2's?

Patrick Quick · Answer

I am going to have fire up the the discussion of the ongoing issue of forced and rushed upgrades at the end of the year (from last year: Sage 300 CRE: Reminder: supported version for year-end 2019 ) that apparently is falling on deaf ears at Sage. For three years now, a full upgrade has been mandated at the last moment to stay up-to-date on payroll and its associated tax tables and forms. Big warnings and chaos if we don't upgrade in time. My team and I have been put behind the eight-ball year after year due to these Sage upgrades; forcing us to work a 24+ hour day or over an entire long weekend during the Holidays to keep our company current and not upsetting business production. This has also left us very susceptible to making mistakes as we rush around trying to upgrade clients and servers in all of our locations which wastes enormous amounts of valuable resources that would better be spent producing instead of supporting a software vendor. Sage support is also all but unreachable since we are all in the same boat, inevitably running into roadblocks, and the support offices have banking hours unless we are lucky enough to reach Canadian support (this pulled my bacon out of the fire two years ago when File Doctor went berserk). As stated above, a full upgrade is going to be required from version 18.4.5 to 20.3 that is not even available yet with less than five weeks until the end of the year. Sometime in December is the closest estimate I have gotten. Last year it was not even available until two weeks before the first hour of 2020 struck. We ended up having to piecemeal the process and hold our accounting department at bay until the first week of January. Unacceptable! 
 I have a couple of suggestions: 
 1). Have the year-end full upgrade available in September or October. This allows plenty of time to do the hard work on our end. Make the payroll an update at the server level only. This could be a small download that requires maybe half an hour to apply and has no effect on the client; which is where most of the arduous work and time is spent. It could even be integrated into the existing Payroll process (Payroll --> Tools --> Download Taxes). 
 2). Allow the payroll tax tables and forms to be compatible with the prior version(s) of the software. This would fix the problem outright and allow many of us to breathe much easier. It would also give us a choice as to when we upgrade. For example, we are on an infrastructure refresh right now that is going to take us a bit longer than anticipated due to COVID and other unforeseen circumstances. We were hoping to migrate to the new servers and upgrade at the same time while implementing the Replicator 2.0, all in one shot. Now, that choice has been eliminated since we will be crossing the year end date. Also, some companies want the latest and greatest versions while others want the stability of software that has matured from its initial release. This should be left to to the customer, not mandated by the vendor.

Patrick Quick · Answer

Neither of my suggestions is on a set time line. The first simply asks that the software itself be upgraded earlier than weeks before the end of the year. The taxes could be updated quickly without requiring the clients to be touched. The second suggestion actually makes more sense to me, especially when there are no database changes being made like upgrading from 18.4.5 (late 2019/early 2020 version) to 20.x.

Mzplumber · Answer

OMG!!!! THANK YOU, PATRICK QUICK FOR YOUR RESPONSE! 
 THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE KEEP RUNNING IN TO AS WELL! WE HAVE BEEN USING SAGE TIMBERLINE SOFTWARE FOR 19 + YEARS AND HAVE HAD A NUMBER OF REALLY AWFUL & CRITICALLY DISRUPTIVE EXPERIENCES WITH THE FORCED FULL UPDATES AT YEAR END! I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU, BUT FEAR YOUR SUGGESTIONS WILL FALL ON DEAF EARS.

April Dahl · Answer

You will need to be on the year-end release for version 20 when that comes available. This is the only version that will be tested with the Aatrix changes. There have been many government changes this year affecting some forms. You will have to be on the year-end release to ensure your forms are produced correctly. 
 
 April

Sage Construction & Real Estate

Year End 2020

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