I have a set of accounts that I need to do. Rather than pay for additional packages from Sage and the fact that there are so few transaction in this other company we have decided to use an old version of sage that we have loaded on to the PC. The only problem now is that I have an error message when I try to print out the TB. The msg says:
C:\program file (x86)\SAGE\ACCOUNTS\REPORTS\\*TB.SRT contains an invalid path
Do you know what this means please? I have not as far as I am aware changed anything on the software apart from load up my opening balances.
I think the problem is down to old versions of Sage being written to assume the user has admin privileges on the computer - which for a long time was probably true on Windows systems, even under XP where it was possible, and even sensible, to have separate user and admin accounts.
Try, therefore, running sage with admin privileges. If you're running on Windows 7, right click on the shortcut for Sage and click on "Run as administrator" to do this as a one-off to try it. If it works, right click the short-cut and click "Properties", then on the "Shortcut" tab, then on the "Advanced" button. Tick "Run as administrator" and then click "Ok" and "Ok" again in the main window. Thereafter, Sage should run with admin privileges.
Other versions of Windows may vary - though Vista is probably very similar.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Thank you for all your responses. I have spoken to Sage and found out that the software I have has already been registered to another company and we do not have a multi company licence on it. Also it is version 10 and the current version is 19 so it is very old and out of date so would probably be more hassle than its worth, considering the small volume of transactions that need to be input.
While I don't condone using software outside of the licence terms (which is what you would have been doing if you'd carried on using it under the circumstances*), that wouldn't have been the cause of the problem.
As I suggested, the cause was almost certainly that the software needed to be run with admin privileges.
* Although just "being registered to a different company" and "being USED by a different company" aren't the same thing. I'm fairly sure - though I can't find any references to back this up now - that such restrictions can't be upheld in general.
Having said that, it might be valid if the original company is still using Sage, but a newer version, having had discounted upgrades via their Sage contract.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
Thank you for all your responses. I have spoken to Sage and found out that the software I have has already been registered to another company and we do not have a multi company licence on it. Also it is version 10 and the current version is 19 so it is very old and out of date so would probably be more hassle than its worth, considering the small volume of transactions that need to be input.
I worked for someone once who bought a second hand copy of Sage in good faith which was registered to another Company (single user) and when I spoke to Sage they said that as long as we had some sale documents to prove we purchased it by legitimate means they could re-register it to the new Company.
I agree though that using such an old version on a newer operating system is probably a recipe for trouble
"No, I don't have UAC switched off, and I have v16 of Sage Instant and Sage 50 2009....are they considered "newer" versions?"
The short answer is "Probably, yes".
Here's the longer answer:
I would hope by 2009, Sage was behaving itself!
One of the things it did to misbehave was store the accounts data in a subdirectory of the program - so you'd have Sage in something like C:\Program Files\Sage\Instant\ and your data would be in C:\Program Files\Sage\Instant\AccData\Company0\
Back in the DOS days (when the program would probably have been in C:\Sage - if you were flashy enough to have a hard drive!) writing user data into subdirectories of the directory in which the program was stored was the done thing, and the same with early versions of Windows. I think it was Windows 95 that first introduced the "My Documents" folder as the default place for storing documents, but even then user data (which isn't the same as documents) tended to go into subdirectories of the program.
I think - but ICBW - that XP is where it all started to go funny because, IIRC, that's when Microsoft finally woke up to the idea that separating users and admins was sensible (the right way to use a computer would be to log in as an admin to perform any installations, etc, then log back out again, and log in as a user to actually *use* the computer) and provided another location for storing data, in a directory under the user name, along side the directory for user documents. A program run by an ordinary user wouldn't have admin privileges, and therefore wouldn't be able to write any data into subdirectories of Program Files.
Which is where Sage was still writing its data.
It was common for people using XP to just use the computer as an admin, though, because it was more convenient than logging out as a user and back in as an admin to install stuff - so this broken behaviour of the software didn't affect a significant amount of people.
Somewhere down the line - and I don't know which versions - Sage finally caught up with good sense and moved the data out of the program's subdirectories and into Program Data.
I think Vista came out in 2007(?) and made it more convenient for users to use the computer *as users* and have separate admin accounts, though it was far from perfect, so more people will have encountered problems with Sage needing to be run from an admin account, so it seems likely that a version of Sage that came out after Vista will have seen the problem addressed.
So Sage 50 from 2009, and Instant 16, which I think must be of similar vintage, probably are what could be called "newer versions" in the context of what I said.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
I remember using a DOS based accounts programme when I first started doing my husband's business bookkeeping "back in the day" How do you know all this stuff?
I was using computers before most people even knew what computers were. And with Sage, at my first (and only) "proper" job, when they got their first computer and a copy of Sage to use for a clients records, because I was the guy who knew about computers, I was tasked with learning to use the software so that I could teach the person who would actually be using it. This was at the tail end of the 1980s.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
I remember my work's first computer. I was the person charged with learning how to use it. It was the size of a desk and the disks were those huge 8in floppy type Unfortunately I then got pregnant and never got to use it!
Our first home PC was the Commodore 64 with the tape deck.....and people moan about how long it takes to load things now!! lol
I would check the paths within the Help > About to see where both versions of Sage are picking the reports from. Sometimes multiple versions of sage on the same machine have a few issues when it comes to sharing data paths. It maybe that the older version has overwritten the reports used by the newer version or trying to use the reports designed for the newer version which may cause compatibility problems.
Just a hunch as I have seen this happen before. Had to redirect the paths around and a couple of re-installs it worked eventually.
