Tuesday 13 December 2011

Simply Accounting 2012 Critical Bug: Cheque Run Period End Date comes out wrong!

We fielded a question from a client about their having a problem with Simply 2012.

When they did a cheque run they put in a Period End Date of 12/08/2011.

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When they did the cheque run the actual printed cheques had a Period End Date: 12/13/2011!

We verified that the custom Crystal Reports forms had the correct fields in them which they did.

After a few tests we came to realize that Simply 2012 was dropping in the date chosen when the Simply company file was first opened. Most folks open with today’s date so that’s the date that would show up on the cheques.

We called into Simply support and sure enough they knew about the problem. They also knew about two ways to work around the problem until an update fixes it:

  1. When opening the company file set the date to Period End Date for a payroll cheque run only.
    • Once done the payroll run log off and back on again with the correct day’s date.
  2. Use the Calendar button to the right of the date field shown above to set the Period End Date and then Print Preview and it should show the correct date.

The Simply technician indicated that an update is forthcoming to address this problem.

In the mean time our client has run through hundreds of pre-printed cheques with the wrong period end date at a _huge_ cost to them. What do they do? In this case they could let folks know that there was a glitch . . . maybe.

Conclusion

How is it that a software vendor will refuse to publish a bug about this kind of problem? It is not a simple little problem that has very little impact! What about those companies that are doing payroll cheque runs into the thousands?!?

This bug can have a big impact on a company that uses the Sage Simply 2012 accounting product.

We challenged the Simply tech support person on Sage’s not publishing the problem anywhere on their site and they indicated that our suggestion to publish high impact bugs on their Support Site would be brought up at a meeting of some sort.

This situation is very disappointing and really undermines our trust level with Sage. We already take Intuit’s QuickBooks with a first version grain of salt. Now it looks like we will be lumping Simply Accounting into that camp as well. :(

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Doug H. said...

To defend Sage a little bit, I installed SA 2012 Premium last weekend, and I recall seeing a warning about a couple bugs that were going to be fixed in an upcoming December release. I am pretty sure this was one of them, but the organization I was putting it on for doesn't use SA for payroll or printing cheques so I forged ahead.

I agree an email, web post, and perhaps a statement on the download site would have been nice.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Doug,

The catch is that we are dealing with a large number of accounting firms that are on premium services contracts with Sage and Intuit.

_They_ should receive some sort of notice since they do a lot of work with client's company files.

It was one of our accounting firm clients that hit this bug as they do bookkeeping on Simply and others.

Thanks,

Philip