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There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage

Sage Drive enters its third day of wobbles and woe

Darling of the beancounters, accounting behemoth Sage is having a mid-year wobble as EU customers of Sage Drive enter Day Three of iffy service.

Things had been tottering since 14 June as customers complained about performance. Symptoms of Sage slowness included not being able to log into the company's Sage Accounts 50 service.

By yesterday afternoon, Sage was forced to briefly yank the whole thing offline to deal with the mysterious underlying condition that was causing the borkage before trumpeting a return to normal performance by 15:16 UTC.

The trumpeting was, alas, shortlived, as problems resurfaced an hour later. Despite continued efforts by the company to deal with its problems, issues have continued today for many customers.

Sage Drive itself is geared up for home and remote working – which is handy right now, what with one thing and another. Customers upload an encrypted copy of their Sage Accounts data to the Sage Drive cloud service and then invite others to access it via the Sage Drive Management Centre.

Changes made are then uploaded to the data in the Sage Drive cloud and downloaded to all connected locations.

The result is that users, running the same version of Sage 50 Accounts, can then connect to the accounts data from an internet-connected computer. Very neat, especially in these trying times. Except, of course, when it doesn't work.

Sage is not unfamiliar with the curse of bork: its Business Cloud Accounting service turned its toes skywards around this time last year. The company has also been offloading bits and pieces, including its Brazilian operation last March, in the pursuit of cloudier business models.

The company's most recent set of results for H1 2020 showed a 5.7 per cent increase of total organic revenue to £935m compared to H1 2019 but a 0.6 per cent drop in its organic operating profit margin to 22.8 per cent compared to the previous year (PDF).

As for Sage Drive, at the time of writing, it continues to have issues. The company's status page warns that "some customers may be unable to access Sage Drive at all."

We have contacted Sage to learn more and will update should the company respond. In the meantime, we fear customer patience is starting to wear a little thin.

* Tottering Infrastructure Turns Some Users Purple

A spokesperson for Sage sent us a statement:

"We know that a minority of customers in the UK are having some issues with Sage Drive. We're getting in touch with those affected and have a team of engineers working to fix the issue." ®

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