Ridings Administrative Services Inc.

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What's New in Sage 50?

With the release of Sage 50 2014.3, what's new is very little.

Because of the removal of Crystal Reports printing support, Sage had to change the method of printing all the government forms. Few people were aware that all plain paper forms like T4's, T4 Summary, ROE, RL1, were printed using Crystal Reports templates. So they have now changed the internal programming so they are not relying on the Crystal Print Engine anymore.

They changed the method of popup for the Message Centre messages as they come in because many people were missing them and didn't even know it has been in the program for a couple of years (Version Year 2010).

You no longer have to go to the Learning Centre to click on the link to Chat with Support as it is now on the Home Window toolbar. OH, and there is no Learning Centre anymore. It automatically takes you to the Sage University website. The tutorials seem to be missing as well.

That's it. Under Help, See What's New does list a few other things that are new but to be honest, I find it hard to get excited about that stuff. I was hoping to see things like "We now have a customer PO number box on the sales invoice data entry screens for you to use", or "We started breaking the year end barrier in 2013 and now we are finished. All those rent cheques you need to cut for the next year can be done!" or "We are now searching the sales and purchase invoice Order Number fields in the Quick Search feature". Now that would excite me. In fact, those would give me the warm fuzzies and restore some of my faith in Sage as a company that really is listening when they say they are.

There are usually a few things Sage does to the program they don't tell us about. Anyone seen the Sage Advisor yet? It was new in the first release of 2014. The process for batch printing of payables cheques within Sage 50 has now been changed as of 2014.3. Sage did not announce this. In addition, the csv files that used to reside on the hard drive after Sage 50 was closed, are now deleted from the system. This is not a major problem, but was considered a bit of a security issue because for example, the last paycheque for an employee would still be there in the past if users printed paycheques with Crystal. I like this but it does reinforce the need to follow Rick's 10 Steps to Crystal Success (part of my course taught across Canada from 2003 to 2005), if you are doing Crystal Reports design work.

Back to Crystal. If you run the MS Office Documents program in Sage 50 2014.3 do not be fooled by the fact that you can still see Crystal Reports templates. You can still see them, it will still ask you for your login name and password, and then it will crash, crash big. Ok, actually it just tells you the account name or password is not valid. But Sage said Crystal would be removed and I found users can still access part of it.

For your forms, if you still wish to print forms created under the original concepts of forms printing in Sage 50 (with Crystal Reports templates that use the exported csv files), you need to activate them under Setup, Reports & Forms. This will force the program to continue to export the csv file information as before. See the image below. Please note that a bug in the Sage 50 program may cause this checkbox to become unchecked without notice. BizMan Reports will let you know about this. The most likely cause reported by Portal Crane Parts Ltd. in Port Coquitlam, BC is the changing of printer drivers but we have not been able to confirm this in tests at Ridings Administrative Services Inc. However, we have seen it when working with a client computer North of Toronto as well as at Portal Crane. Five networks in total have experienced this problem based on our client reports as of the end of July 2014. Anohter consultant has indicated he has seen reports of the problem as well.

In addition to this, if you no longer wish to print a form from Sage 50 and have BizMan Reports do the printing for you (or some other program that reads the csv files), then you are forced to pick a printer driver that will not really print. Sage chose not to put in a "No Printer" option when you hit print so users can just hit print and wait for a response to indicate the csv files have been created. This complicates workflow but for those who wish to print something from Sage 50 and at the same time use the csv files, it is ok.

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Last Edited: August 31, 2016