No Crystal Reports viewer in Sage 50/2015 menu

Tuesday 22 July 2014 @ 10:18 pm

A few months back I wrote about Sage (Peachtree) dropping the built in Crystal license from their 2015 accounting software. Today I heard from a customer who has already upgraded and realized something that I had missed.  There is no longer the ability to run Crystal Reports from within the Sage menu. You can still write reports in Crystal if you have it.  You can even use the “GetPeach” custom functions.  But Crystal Reports can now be run only outside of Sage software.

This is important because it involves extra costs. To run the reports outside of Sage you either have to have a copy of Crystal Reports, or a third party report viewer. Since Crystal Reports is licensed by “named user” an office would need to have a separate Crystal Reports license for each person running reports – even if they all ran the reports on the same machine.  Even with just a handful of users you would be talking thousands of new dollars.  Fortunately these reports can also be run from third party viewer programs which are much less expensive.  A viewer lets users open, refresh, preview, print and export reports.  The difference is that the viewers don’t allow you to modify the reports. So I expect to see Sage customers shopping for viewers in the next year.

If you are not familiar with the available viewers you can read my annual comparison.









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