Want to know the big changes for your version?

Latest Changes

Improved performance (selective)

This has been the bug bear of many a Sage user for some time.  The initial results seem to be promising, however we must warn users that the underlying architecture of Sage 50 has not changed, the performance improvements we are seeing are as a result of improved coding, not new technology.  The only affect a few things, most things such as reports are not much different.

The real big difference is on viewing accounts and opening ledgers.  These processes used to take a very long time, now they don't.  

Here is the Performance Benchmarking Report that Sage produced.

Stability

There have been stability issue, locking up, waiting for files to be released and more in the past. These have, we are told, been addressed.  However the issues with SMB2 seem to still be here, so those of you with the latest Microsoft operating systems on servers, need to do the changes to force them not to use SMB2 (unless all your users are also using SMB2)

We really need stability and I hope that we will soon have good reports coming back from the field.  We have not experienced any of these issues ourselves during testing.

Quick Search

The quick search is everything I wanted to see, enter a postcode and the clients matching pop up, enter a name, or a phone number and the same happens, in the products module enter a supplier part number and you have them listed.

Here is my test scenario, I have 88784 sales orders, I want to find one for Mr Collins, enter Collins in quick search hit the button and wait a count of 3 and the results are filtered.  Open the order go to the delivery address, copy the postcode, go to purchase orders paste the delivery postcode into the quick search hit the button and wait a count of 3 and the results are filtered.

It is impressive.

Quick Print

In V2011 we got a quick way to email, this is the same thing only for Layouts.  Having one layout is now more important than ever.

Closed Ledger Dates

Why didn't this get thought of sooner?  The problem with open item accounting (and the advantage) is that everything is date sensitive and you can get problems by accidentally back dating stuff.

This simple change stops (or warns you) if you back date.

Sage 50 Mobile

This is really an external product to Sage 50, it runs on iPhones and shortly to be available on Android, you are able to enter orders and things like that, there are some access rights available so the staff can't see everything.  The application will (I am told) run with earlier versions of Sage 50 but not officially supported.  It is in the app store now and it is FREE.

More info on the sage website here http://www.sage.co.uk/sage50mobile

Direct Payments (International)

You can now import your web sales from your Sage Pay account to Sage 50 Accounts. By downloading payments from your Sage Pay account your software now creates invoices and updates your accounts for you. 

Database Changes

There have been very few database changes, I think this illustrates how sage have really concentrated on performance in this release rather than extra features that slow things down even more.  Database sizes between V2011 and V2012 are virtually the same. For those of you with a desire to know such things, here are the changes I found using ODBC (note that not all changes are necessarily exposed in ODBC)