July 2018 UPDATES: Pegg wins an Award! Sage is ahead in PCI Compliance, easier cloud subscriptions are coming and more.…!

4 minute read time.

Let’s spotlight the innovation that is helping make Sage Business Cloud the one and only business cloud platform our customers will ever need. It’s been a busy Q3! Our smart digital assistant, Pegg won an international award for Best AI-based Solution for Financial Services.

"Winning products and companies were selected based on a variety of criteria, including most innovative and technologically advanced products and services, with the ultimate goal of recognizing the "Break Through" nominations for AI technologies and companies." - markets.businessinsider.com

Our partnership with Stripe has processed £300,000 of payments in the UK since May. And we celebrated our first anniversary with Yodlee bank feed.

Beating the competition in PCI Compliance

Sage is also beating the competition in PC Compliance. We became one of an exclusive group of 61 companies globally to achieve PCI Security Standards certification for data transfer. PCI is fast becoming the essential global compliance standard that is likely to be mandated by all the card schemes including VISA, MasterCard, and American Express for face-to-face credit and debit card transactions. This is a massive achievement and will help us ensure our Payments and Banking solutions continue to lead the pack.

Sage's Accountant's Network

Did you know that Sage is the only worldwide company who can provide solutions to take the business from start-up, to scale-up, through to enterprise, allowing the customer to migrate seamlessly across the product range?

For accountants:

Sage provides a whole suite of products to help accountants run their practice more efficiently; we offer accountants real-time access to their customer data , which makes collaboration, the sharing of information and ultimately the accountant role more efficient.

It's a great relationship!

And it's about to get better!

Cloud subscriptions are soon getting easier

We’re making advancements in how we manage cloud subscriptions via a new Subscription Lifecycle Service (SLCS) API. It means Sage products can be sold and accessed via third party platforms. The API delivers a consistent way for subscriptions to our products to be fulfilled. It also enables products and other systems to be notified of changes to that subscription including upgrades, renewals, and cancelations. SLCS already enables our products to be sold via AppDirect in the US and Telefonica in Spain. Work is now underway to integrate with other eCommerce platforms, including Rogers in Canada, British Telecom in the UK, and Amazon—massively expanding the number of potential customers for our products.

By the way, it's worth re-mentioning that:

We want to hear about your experience with Sage 50cloud!

If you want to participate in any of these studies, or in a future usability study, please contact us at [email protected].

We’d like to reward your participation. If you become part of the Sage User Panel, you can earn reward points for gift cards. Sign Up Now

In blogs this month we explored,

The Sage - Accounting app

If you have clients with Sage | Accounting or on Sage 50cloud it's still possible to connect both products to the Sage - Accounting app for use on iOS or Android mobile devices.

Here's How to setup the Sage -Accounting app in this blog

**Optimize your Wi-Fi connection (WPA3 announced*) for Sage 50cloud**

Protect your business against eavesdropping of data or somebody guessing your passwords. If you must use Wi-Fi, we recommend not forcing programs shut and or turning off / putting computers to sleep too quickly to ensure that data synchronizes.

As soon as it's available, upgrade your Wi-Fi gear to have the newest format called WPA3 (announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance June 2018*). This evolution of Wi-Fi is said to be better: faster, more secure and reliable. There's more to wireless networks than just connecting to them. Learn more about this here.

Have your clients installed Sage 50 2018.3 yet?

If they haven't already, then get them to install the original 2018.3 update, it takes 2 minutes. Visit KB 88076 (FR article 260-1008014) and run and install the 178MB download.

Note that a Hotfix was released for those with Payroll in Ontario. Here's how to know if the 2018.3 hotfix is installed.

Lastly,