back to article Have I been paid, Sage? Cloudy wage service locks out users

Employees signed up to Sage's 50cloud Payroll service have been having problems accessing their payslips after an update borked servers. The problem, which appeared to affect a minority of users, began on 25 June. Users, keen to check their latest payslip, found themselves unable to log in, receiving a slightly worrying " …

  1. Jeroen Braamhaar







    1. Danny 14 Silver badge

      I was warning our compliance officer that moving everything to the cloud is a bad idea, I was convincing him that having a hybrid approach of site and cloud resiliency was a reasonably good idea. We were trialling sage online as it works out cheaper than onsite (against my suggestion) and we were hit by this. It was very very funny being in the meeting the week after. It was also very funny listening to the story our Bursar told me when the sales rep tried to explain things away.

      luckily we could run our local sage plus a manual BACS run so our guys and gals got paid. We are sticking with onsite only as sage wont do a hybrid.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I have to say, "not working" seems to be the default for Sage from what I've seen over the years.

    I had one particular client whom I told "no, don't share that over a Windows network, Sage only recommend Netware. You don't even have a multiuser licence. Only bad things can happen if you do that."

    Client: "Nothing will go wrong. Share it anyway."

    Me: "*sigh* if you insist. But if anything goes wrong, it's on you."

    -- All data lost --

    Client: "This is your fault"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I enjoyed be told to be ready for GDPR by Sage...their contracts and statements were shall we say....presented long after the marketing department told us to be've gotta be worried when the marketing department are the only ones on the ball for legal stuff.

      PS. Isn't Sage the largest UK tech company now?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        PS. Isn't Sage the largest UK tech company now?

        I'm surprised by that. First, really, that they somehow still exist, which - given their absurdly high level of incompetence - always baffles me, and second, that they haven't been bought by some hedge fund, loaded with debt, sold on to some clueless investors who don't realise they've just bought a sinking ship and gone bust.

  3. Blockchain commentard

    I think someone needs some 'Sage' advice on doing updates !!!!!!!!

    1. Keith Langmead

      Reinstall the cloud perhaps?

      Maybe they called their own support team... as anyone who's tried getting support from Sage knows, the standard advise is to uninstall and reinstall Sage. Maybe their poor engineers have spent the last week re-installing their entire cloud setup hoping that will fix the issue! ;)

  4. steve-b

    Total Inability to Supply Usual Payslips

  5. adam payne

    Are you benefitting from the latest new features and improvements

    Yes i'm sure people are benefiting from your improved silent.

  6. Tezfair

    hidden T&Cs, robbing buzztards

    I don't normally have their support, but I did last year to catchup my perpetual license only to be told that I had to give them 30 days notice, only they send the invoice after the cut off day. All I got back from Sage was " if the renewal is not paid then it will be passed to debt collection and a 11% fee is applied on top of the total cost of the amount owed. "

    Needless to say I will no longer deal with them and i'm working on getting my clients to move too.

  7. robf355

    It doesn't surprise me they they have cocked something up, their software (certainly line 50) hasn't really moved on that much from the dos version. If there was any decent competition in accounting software sage would be out of business tomorrow.

    I'm still using V9 financial controller, it works (they are on V25 now) but we have to upgrade to use hmrc making tax digital from 2020. Currently we store our accounts data on a mapped Samba drive, Sage support told me I need to use a windows server or it wont work!, mind you they also told me V9 wouldn't work on windows 7-10.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sage protip


      Sage is stuck in the mentality that the "Server" is the main accountant's PC and that the "clients" are everyone else. Administrative account? Why would you want that? The main accountant handles all the administrative stuff, right?

      Just make sure all of your clients have the same file mapping. Ugly file locking gremlins can pop if if one client attaches using "\\sageserver\sageshare\mycompany" and another attaches using "F:\\mycompany".

  8. AndyMulhearn

    Peter Jones

    Well if it’s good enough for Peter Jones (Dragon’s Den) it should be good enough for anyone.

  9. LeahroyNake

    Sage support

    Sage support is not optional as far as I am concerned.

    Line 50 is a total mess and the Sage Data Service is a nightmare with no proper technical documentation. I got it running over RDP but couldn't package it as an app and had to give the users a full remote desktop.

    One gem from Sage support when they asked for the IP of the server when trying to fix a local client install. I gave them the host name... no that doesn't always work ? They couldn't tell me why and it didn't fix the issue. Reinstalling windows did though :/ how much are we paying for this again ?

  10. adnim


    on Netware worked quite well. Support was pretty good too. They updated the software remotely via a dedicated modem/tel number. They would warn us of impending updates, should we wish to back up.

    Backups were daily anyway, but they didn't just change the system without warning. Nothing ever broke after updates, so I guess they tested things. It wasn't perfect though. not every entry was validated properly, users could break things.

    Only had to call a few times in 5 years and support was good, Once the help desk got to know me they never bothered with the script I was just told "a dev will mail you soon".

    btw Micross was modular. As well as payroll it handled stock control, BOM's and lots of other shit.

    But I digress I was just overwhelmed with nostalgia at the headline. What is the topic? Sage? What does that do again? Ah OK... Carry on ;-)

  11. Mintyboy

    Didn't bother ringing Sage lack of support we have just changed this month to the cloudy payslips after they told me I had to give our HR Drones Admin access to the domain and local PC to be able to send out the payslips by email since the last update....

    Needless to say I hold their support people just below HP and BT.

    Thankfully I will not have to deal with morons much more as we are having a sage 200 box installed that I will nothing to do with ... thank you External support people ...

  12. steviebuk Silver badge

    The Cloud....

    ...other peoples computers you have no control over.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    sage arrgggh

    Sage consultants are dumb

    had one send me an xml spec for a data import thing into sage....

    wrote the code to make the correct xml....

    gets email saying it's failing, look at their error and due to xml spec specifying an "optional" field that we had no data for I hadn't filled it..

    The idiots didn't understand their own xml spec's

  14. Zippy's Sausage Factory

    I wonder if Sage are looking at this, checking out user names and trying to match them with customers? I've had that happen (not with Sage) in the past, but I suspect that's why there's so many anonymous posts on here...

    (Before anyone asks, I use Gnucash thanks, which is great.)

  15. PeterM42

    Sage is so dreadful that..... partner who has done payroll (manually) for decades, after a couple of years struggling with Sage, decided to "outsource" to their accountants.

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