The Future of Sage BusinessVision (BV)

Separate fact from fiction, and understand your options

Let's try and keep this as simple and short as we can: If you are still using Sage BusinessVision, you really should be thinking long and hard about whether that's still a good idea.

There are quite a number of reasons why it's getting risky, but the biggest is that it is never going to be materially improved to meet modern, changing requirements. As well, there's going to come a day when it just won't work on a modern PC any longer, and/or Sage will finally discontinue it.

If you are no longer paying Sage for their support plans, then consider the risk of what happens when it no longer works on, say, Windows 12, or after some other Windows Update. If Sage does patch for that, you would need to buy the whole software again in order to get that patch. Why would you pay full price to re-buy a legacy program that hasn't really improved in 15 years? Did you know there are other options that in fact would be far better, far more modern, and less expensive as well?

On the other hand, if you are still on a support plan with Sage, we highly recommend you stop. It's understandable if you use BV for payroll, since to get payroll updates, you need to be on plan. But think of what you're paying them, and what you're getting in return. For that price, you could actually get much better options.

There's no point in going through all the reasons to get more current with your accounting software. Suffice it to say that Sage have demonstrated clearly they are not going to make BV better, but they'll be happy to keep taking your money - for now at least.

Even if you wanted to move off BV to another Sage product to offset those risks, they don't have a reasonable upgrade path anyway. There are only one or two systems they claim to have a conversion tool for, and those conversions won't even keep all your data. Plus, they'll certainly end up being far more expensive.

So what are your options?

Your options basically boil down to these:

• Keep doing what you're doing, and hope for the best
• Upgrade to something Sage is offering, for more money, and without all your data
• Upgrade to Spire Accounting software for less money to get a modern system that's very well supported, very robust, less expensive, AND it lets you keep and migrate all of your BusinessVision data at no extra cost
• Change to some other third party system that's more appropriate for you for whatever reasons are important for you

If you start now, then by this time next year, you could be set for the next 10 years or more.

We would love to have the discussion with you about what these options mean, and how things could go very nicely indeed for you. You'll wish you had called earlier!

Give us a call. Let's talk about it.