As spring approaches,  “Peachtree Upgrade Season” is upon us. For the past few years Sage Software has released a new version of Peachtree every May or June. This year (2009) Peachtree will begin shipping its Peachtree 2010 product line on or about May 15.

Why should I bother to upgrade, my software runs just fine?  We offer two responses to clients who offer this all-too-familiar refrain.

First, Sage Software’s support policies provide end-user technical support for the “current” version of Peachtree and the prior two releases. Thus with the release of Peachtree 2010, Sage will shortly discontinue product support for any versions of Peachtree older than the 2008 edition. There are obvious revenue generation motivations for Sage to follow this course, but it also speaks to the difficulty of maintaining a support organization with expertise in many different product editions.  Software telephone support is not a long-term career choice for most aspiring technologists, so these positions inevitably turn over pretty rapidly. Chances are, after three years there are very few support technicians at Sage who have been exposed to a version of Peachtree that is more than three years old.  TriStar’s staff does not turn over, so we support any version of Peachtree in use, but our options are similarly limited if we need to turn to the “manufacturer” for product support on your behalf.

Second, Peachtree users who process payroll within Peachtree absolutely need to remain on a supported version of the product. When payroll tax tables change, payroll tax forms change, or more significantly, when payroll tax policy changes (forcing a change in the actual processing instructions) Sage will only make those changes to the product editions presently supported.  With health care reform, economic stimulus efforts, and a myriad of other “sea changes” emanating from Washington, it is very likely that “older” versions of the Peachtree software will not be capable of processing these changes.

So, the practical implications of this policy is that you need to upgrade your system no less frequently than every three years.  With the “life cycle” of computer hardware now acknowledged to be less than three years, there are often “technological imperatives” for upgrading your accounting software. Applications released more than three years ago (and likely designed well before that) are unlikely to behave flawlessly in a new operating system, on new computer hardware, that didn’t exist when the accounting application was originally designed.

Love it or hate it, responsible business owners should expect to upgrade their “business critical” software applications (of which accounting is certainly one) no less frequently than every three years.

So, how old is your accounting software?