Per the reseller webinar on Tuesday, March 27, Sage has announced its new policy on purchasing Peachtree – soon to be Sage 50 – licenses. All new users will be required to purchase a BusinessCare subscription to the application as a condition of purchase. Existing licensees will not be required to purchase BusinessCare in order to purchase an upgrade license. BusinessCare will be strongly recommended, but will remain optional (for this year).

For Peachtree Quantum users, nothing has changed at all. The same policy that has been in effect since the introduction of Quantum remains in effect. New Peachtree Complete and Premium users will essentially be brought into the same subscription program that has existed for Quantum all along.

So if you are using Peachtree Quantum already, you can stop reading at this point. The rest of this message applies only to Peachtree Complete and Premium users.

While not mandatory this year for license upgrades, it appears that BusinessCare subscriptions will be very attractively priced, and may be a good opportunity for those that think this approach could be useful. From our perspective, we believe the four principal benefits of BusinessCare are:

1. automatic license renewals on an annual basis, for a defined price identified and paid for in advance
2. 800-number support for “simple” technical questions regarding use of the software – not, however, for business-related, environmental, or “best practice” type of questions; these typically bounce to us as the local support entity.
3. A license activation for Peachtree Business Intelligence. This is a very handy tool for custom report development (using Excel) that is somewhat more flexible, and easier to use, than Crystal Reports.
4. Discounted access to Peachtree on-line training videos, which can be useful for learning about routine Peachtree functionality, or “refresher training” on an infrequently used function.

Pricing for upgrade licenses, both with and without BusinessCare, is expected to be available next week. We will publish that information as soon as it becomes available.

Once important caveat for those who use Peachtree for Payroll processing: once your current tax table subscription expires, you will be required to purchase BusinessCare Gold to continue receiving payroll tax updates.

So, the “take away” from all of this is that, if you are interested in upgrading to Peachtree 2013, you are still able to do so without purchasing a BusinessCare subscription (unless you are using Peachtree for payroll). The choice is yours – for this year. This will likely not be the case next May, when the 2014 product is released.

Sage will continue to support the current edition and the two prior editions of the product when the 2013 product is released. Thus if you are using an edition of Peachtree earlier than 2011, you will no longer have support from the manufacturer a few months after the release of the 2013 product.

We will send out pricing information, including new features and pricing for our own TriStar Software License Insurance Plans during the first two weeks in April. First shipments of Sage 50 2013 Edition are slated for mid-May, with “pre-release” pricing available until that time.