Sage accounts data corruption is not acceptable for several reasons, including:
- Data Integrity: Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and its integrity is paramount for accurate financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Data corruption compromises the accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness of financial information, leading to potential errors, misstatements, and financial discrepancies.
- Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Businesses are required to maintain accurate financial records and comply with various legal and regulatory requirements, such as tax laws, auditing standards, and industry regulations. Data corruption can result in non-compliance, exposing the organization to legal liabilities, fines, penalties, and reputational damage.
- Operational Disruptions: Data corruption disrupts normal business operations, causing delays, inefficiencies, and disruptions in day-to-day activities. Employees may encounter difficulties accessing, retrieving, and processing financial data, leading to productivity losses and frustration.
- Financial Losses: Data corruption can have financial implications, including loss of revenue, increased operational costs, and potential revenue leakage. Additionally, remediation efforts to identify and rectify data corruption issues can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and costly for the organization.
- Reputational Damage: Data corruption can erode stakeholder trust and confidence in the organization’s financial management and reporting capabilities. Reputational damage resulting from data corruption incidents can have far-reaching consequences, affecting relationships with customers, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders.
- Business Continuity: In severe cases, data corruption can jeopardize business continuity and threaten the organization’s viability. Critical financial data may become inaccessible or unusable, hindering essential business functions and decision-making processes.
Given these implications, preventing, and addressing Sage accounts data corruption should be a top priority for organizations. Implementing robust data backup and recovery procedures, maintaining system integrity through regular maintenance and updates, and enforcing strict access controls and security measures are essential steps to mitigate the risk of data corruption and safeguard the organization’s financial health and reputation.
How to get help with Sage 50 Data corruption
If you have your support directly with Sage UK, you will need to contact them directly,
Their help page offer some limited advice about what to do once you have picked up a data corruption has occurred. Please note that if you don’t run the Check Data function then you are likely not to pick up a data corruption. Even if you do, the check data function may not pick it up and you still must be vigilant in looking for signs of the below:
- Does the software crash or freeze anywhere?
- When selecting drop-down lists, are the lists blank or do they freeze?
- Do any of the software windows show strange or random characters?
- Are recently posted transactions or new records missing from your data?
Sage UK also confesses that even data returned to them for repair may not be complete after a repair has been completed
If you take your Sage subscription through a business partner, like Qi, they will provide more tailor made advice and in some instances will complete a more comprehensive data repair than Sage UK (we speak from experience!) You can move your Sage 50c Accounts Professional subscription to a business partner if you choose to and the price you pay to them should be the same as you pay to Sage UK.
How to avoid the risk of Sage 50 data corruption permanently
The Sage 50 architecture will always be open to allowing data corruption. Some, very fortunate businesses will process for many years without experiencing it, but it its true to say that once you have had a major data corruption your Sage database will always be more prone to further instances of corruption. (And again – this is from a place of 28+ years of experience as a Sage Business Partner).
Move to a Modern, browser-based solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
How do modern solutions protect my data?
It’s great to see Microsoft Business Central leveraging Azure SQL Database for storing tenants’ data and implementing a robust backup routine to ensure data integrity and availability. Let’s break down the key points:
- Automated Routine Backups: Microsoft Business Central relies on Azure SQL Database to create automated routine backups of tenants’ data from sandbox or production environments. This relieves tenants from the burden of managing backups themselves and ensures that data is protected against disasters or mishaps.
- Limited Tenant Access to Backups: Tenants using Microsoft Business Central do not have direct access to or control over the backups managed by Azure SQL Database. This helps maintain the integrity and security of the backup data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or tampering.
- Retention Period: Backups created by Azure SQL Database are stored for a month before they are discarded. This retention period strikes a balance between ensuring data availability for recovery purposes and optimizing storage resources by discarding older backups after a reasonable timeframe.
- Geo-Redundancy: Azure SQL Database stores backups in geo-redundant sources, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple regions. This redundancy mitigates the risk of backup unavailability in case of service disruptions or outages in one region, providing added resilience and reliability.
- Backup Routine: The backup routine includes complete backups every week, followed by daily differential backups, and transactional backups every 10 minutes. This comprehensive backup strategy ensures that tenants’ data is continuously protected and enables efficient recovery at different points in time, ranging from weekly snapshots to near-real-time transactional backups.
Overall, Microsoft Business Central’s integration with Azure SQL Database for backup management demonstrates a commitment to data protection, resilience, and business continuity. By leveraging Azure’s robust infrastructure and backup capabilities, businesses can confidently rely on Microsoft Business Central as a secure and reliable platform for managing their financial and operational data.
This type of modern, single SQL database solution ensures that you cannot experience a business-critical data corruption or loss of data.
How Much Does It Cost?
If you need 2 – 3 users of Business Central Essentials which will fully replace not only your financials, but provide CRM, HR and lightweight manufacturing, your annual cost for licensing and support on Business Central via Qi will be LESS than a 2 – 5 user band licence of Sage 50c Accounts Professional.
How do I migrate my data?
Qi will migrate all your Sage data with full history as part of your project. We use our custom toolkit MigrateNow! for this process.
Thought for the Day
Data corruption is a serious business risk, costing time and money. Moving to a modern browser based application such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will remove this risk. Completely.
Contact Qi to explore the project options.