Making I.T. Happen
Accounting and Information Technology, Assistance and Support
Sage 50 Software - End of Life

Sage 50 "End of Life"

Sage have a policy of only supporting the latest versions of Sage 50.

The cost to them of supporting older versions is understandably just too high, they need to have hundreds of people to offer support and it would be too complex to have different teams dealing with different versions.

Some people claim this as a way to make extra money by forcing people to buy upgrades but this is not the case.  Whilst Sage will not provide support to older versions of Sage 50 other third party companies, like ourselves do.  The products are still perfectly serviceable and will continue to work they will not blow up or stop working, indeed at the time of writing all software since Version 7 can still run without problems.  There are some "oddities" you need to do some workarounds to get some older versions to install properly on newer operating systems, but they all work fine.

We have had complaints from a few people about pushy sales people in Sage trying to use "end of life" to force them to upgrade, this is not common. Sage PLC do not endorse the hard selling of their products, if you encounter this I am sure Sage would like you to contact Customer Services so that they can take remedial action.

If you are about to go end of life and you expect to need to upgrade in the next year, it is worth looking at buying an upgrade now rather than going "end of life".  If you do not expect to need to upgrade for another 2-3 years then you probably don't need to worry.

If you have SageCover and a use product that is going "end of life", you can ask for a refund for any SageCover for the period that support will not be provided for.

You do not have to worry about "going end of life"  HOWEVER you need to be aware that to get an upgrade after going "end of life" you have to buy SageCover Extra, this is an annual service which covers all upgrades and gives you SageCover.  Note that end of life versions will not be "fixed" to work with future versions of windows, current "end of life" software is running on Windows 7, but with some loss of functionality and parts that don't work at all with the 64bit version.  With Windows 8 on the horizon, the XP era is coming to a close and keeping "end of life" software running is going to be more difficult.

If you do not need upgrades every year, then SageCover Extra is NOT good value for money.

If you do not call SageCover support frequently then PayAsYouGo support from third parties such as ourselves may be a better value option.

The differences in cost of upgrading vary depending on what product you have, we have made this update matrix so you can see the current difference in price between an end of life upgrade and a normal upgrade.

Sage will automatically renew SageCover and SageCover Extra for you each year. 
If you do not want to renew these services you need to cancel your SageCover in advance