Updating to a supported version is especially important if you run payroll in-house. Income tax rates change fairly often, and if you aren’t current on software maintenance, you aren’t receiving payroll updates either.

All that being said, we don’t recommend that you update your software without first discussing it with your consultant.  You may have third party products that need to be updated at the same time, or you may have customizations that won’t update automatically.  Also, the database (such as SQL or Pervasive) that your software uses may need to be updated at the same time, which would incur an additional cost.  While it’s usually fairly inexpensive to update the database, it can still be an unexpected expense.  For these reasons and more, we always recommend that you wait a while to apply the latest update.

Most recently, Sage has published version 6.0 of Accpac.  On April 1, 2011, Sage is discontinuing support for version 5.4.  If you are on 5.4 and current on maintenance, you’ll want to schedule an update soon.