We are extremely pleased to announce that Dresser & Associates has joined Net@Work, one of the most respected Sage Software Partners in North America and an award-winning end-to-end technology solutions provider. You will see very little change relative to your Sage Software support, really just a name change.
This is the time of year when many organizations are preparing to update their payroll software looking to make the switch with the first payroll of 2011. This is the time to run parallel payrolls to make sure everything works as expected. If you use third-party software to import timesheet data this is also the time to make those tests as well.
There have been major changes in how and where Sage Abra version 9 stores data. The old IDEAL Software’s BST Enterprise Abra Link (also called Aurora Abra Link or ARLink) will not work with Sage Abra Payroll version 9.
Updates to new versions of a program never go according to plan. Every configuration or setup is different and the software developer only tests the default or typical installation, configuration or setup when they release a new version. There will always be configurations that are unique to the organization. These need to be adjusted to make the software work the way you expect them to.
The best practice is to create a clone of the old version of Sage Abra and your data in a test environment and install the new version in this test environment. This way you will know if there is anything about your configuration or setup that will require special handling or a change to your setup. Updating in a test environment can reveal issues in the new version or your data before they are found in your production environment — during a payroll run. This will protect the production data and resolve any problems before they become serious issues while running a payroll. This does take some extra work to run the parallel payroll. This work will pale in comparison to the amount of work in the future should you encounter some serious issue, let alone getting the paychecks out on time.
Another piece of advice is back-up, back-up and back-up before making any changes to your system. Oh, and don’t forget to restore something now and again to make sure the back-up is working correctly.
For more info on CAASPRE Consulting go to our website at www.caaspreconsulting.com.
