AccountEdge abandons Catalina compatibility, customers looking for alternatives

AppleInsider

Priority Software, the developer of AccountEdge, has publicly announced that they will not be able to make its small business accounting software Catalina-compliant, much to the dismay of customers.

Priority Software has made a public declaration that despite its best efforts, it was unable to make AccountEdge's 30-year-old code work with macOS Catalina. Catalina requires programs to be 64-bit, with 32-bit apps no longer supported on the operating system.

Apple added support for 64-bit binaries over a decade ago. When macOS Catalina shipped, it had been 18 months since Apple said that the operating system would not support 32-bit applications.

While Priority Software had initially hoped they would be able to make AccountEdge compatible with Catalina, they learned along the way that it was beyond their abilities. Instead, the company offers a list of solutions for customers. The first solution tells customers to simply avoid upgrading to Catalina.

"We will continue to update AccountEdge for those that continue to use AccountEdge on your Mac," said Priority Software. "We'll deliver payroll tax updates and upgrades for years to come and we will be proactive in communicating our plans," reads the option, which then directs users to the page for AccountEdge 2020.

Another option is for users to use AccountEdge Hosted, a subscription service that is compatible with any Mac or Windows environment, including Catalina. Instead of paying a one-time cost of between $200 and $350, users would need to pay $40 per license per month, which may not be tenable for some small businesses.

They also suggest using Parallels, a PC virtualization software that would enable users to run the 32-bit version of the software on a virtual machine.

As a final solution, the company also suggests using AccountEdge for Windows, which assumes that a user has access to Windows in the first place. Priority Software has stated that they will convert Mac licenses to Windows licenses for users that choose this option.

Understandably, the current customer base has been less than thrilled to receive the news. One customer took to AccountEdge's Facebook page to declare that they've been thrown into crisis, and that AccountEdge has done nothing to recognize the crisis and to help customers.

In an act of solidarity, many other customers have offered helpful suggestions to their distraught peers via the comment section on AccountEdge's Facebook post, including price crunching the cheapest way to continue to to use the software.

sflocal

There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that.  AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably.  It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.

It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them.  Shame on them.  

I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"!  IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!!  What's "2020" about it?!

Lazy company.

edited January 2020

mdriftmeyer

https://www.sage.com/en-us/products/sage-50cloud/

https://www.sage.com/en-us/sage-business-cloud/accounting/

Windows, OS X, Linux.

jeffc

Truly sad a company cannot update there software to current technology. Education is having the same problem as users of Easy Grade Pro have found out.

digitol

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

mystigo

I have been using MYOB, the predecessor to AccountEdge, in a Mac OS 10.6 VM for nearly a decade. It has worked perfectly for me, and I can update the tax tables by hand, which is why I never upgraded to AccountEdge. It is almost certainly possible and quite easy to run AccountEdge out of a VM, but the problem will be the inability to update the tax tables.

edited January 2020

frank777

I'd honestly forgotten MYOB existed. That can't be good for the company.

Accounting has largely moved to SAAS models allowing for multiple OS environments and distributed offices. Intuit Canada has long ignored making Quicken Home and Business available to Mac users. The leaders here are Quickbooks Online, Xero and FreshBooks. Wave Accounting is free. The Mac App Store has a whole page of Accounting software options.

In this environment, the developer's probably right. Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.

sflocal

digitol said:

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

Quit fabricating nonsense to suit your agenda.  If developers are "leaving the platform" as you say, then good riddance.  Wannabe weekend script-kiddies need not go around calling themselves "developers" if they don't know how to convert to 64-bit.  Nice try.

edited January 2020

strangedays

The only reason is they don't want to pay for a macOS software developer. Their solutions are to use the Windows version or....pay a monthly service fee to use the web version.

Another option is for users to use AccountEdge Hosted, a subscription service that is compatible with any Mac or Windows environment, including Catalina. Instead of paying a one-time cost of between $200 and $350, users would need to pay $40 per license per month, which may not be tenable for some small businesses.

strangedays

digitol said:

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

What on earth are you talking about? Please, as one developer to another, tell us how 64-bit macOS is misbehaving to the point where devs are forced to leave it. Don't leave me hangin', bro.

warrenbuffduckh

30 yr old code - No problem, my Mac IIcx still works

edited January 2020

cornchip

StrangeDays said:

digitol said:

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

What on earth are you talking about? Please, as one developer to another, tell us how 64-bit macOS is misbehaving to the point where devs are forced to leave it. Don't leave me hangin', bro.

“Dying Mac market” LoL!!!

darkpaw

frank777 said:

Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.

I can't believe the whole thing is 30 years old. They'll have been updating it to maintain compatibility with new version of OS X/macOS, and also to make use of various new features. It can only be a small portion of the software that they're having trouble with, and if so, what trouble are they having? Are they relying on third-party libraries that aren't compiled for 64-bit? There will likely be replacements. I don't think this was a good move on their part.

fatman

AccountEdge recommends their customers move to Windows 7. 

magman1979

digitol said:

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

Some trolls are smart and can be difficult to spot or weed out, but you are so inept and ridiculous in your assertions that it doesn't even tax a few of my brain cells to see what you are.

I hate trolls, f'ing idiots.

frank777

darkpaw said:

I can't believe the whole thing is 30 years old. They'll have been updating it to maintain compatibility with new version of OS X/macOS, and also to make use of various new features. It can only be a small portion of the software that they're having trouble with, and if so, what trouble are they having? Are they relying on third-party libraries that aren't compiled for 64-bit? There will likely be replacements. I don't think this was a good move on their part.

The whole thing reeks of a company that doesn't really 'get' Mac development. I forgot about MYOB, and I used to own the software.

Let them go in peace. There is no shortage of modern, 64-bit alternatives.

leehamm

Moving your company's accounts from one software package to another, without feature or data loss, is non-trivial. I can understand, even as a technical user, why people find ways and reasons not to move.

In other news, Intuit has had many years to make its QuickBooks software feature-compatible with the Windows version. This too did not happen. Users can't migrate from Windows to the MacOS version.

rob53

Not that it should make any difference but Priority Software is headquartered in Israel. It appears all of its management team (see website) is Israeli. I have to wonder if their refusal to upgrade the Mac version has anything to do with possible security issues implemented in Catalina. When I was working for a US government contractor, we had to get special permission to buy anything manufactured in Israel, mainly because of security issues.

sflocal

darkpaw said:

frank777 said:

Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.

I can't believe the whole thing is 30 years old. They'll have been updating it to maintain compatibility with new version of OS X/macOS, and also to make use of various new features. It can only be a small portion of the software that they're having trouble with, and if so, what trouble are they having? Are they relying on third-party libraries that aren't compiled for 64-bit? There will likely be replacements. I don't think this was a good move on their part.

Fatman said:

AccountEdge recommends their customers move to Windows 7. 

AccountEdge's Twitter threads had representatives commenting that they had tried making the attempt for a while, but just gave up.  The most recent threads where the customers really started giving AccountEdge some well-deserved criticism, resulted in essentially no one from AccountEdge responding back.  So they're getting a lot of self-created flak.

AccountEdge had over a decade to get their act together.  10+ years to convert their code.  I'm a software engineer myself and have done countless conversions in my 30+ years in the business.  They could have made their code 64-bit compliant in phases over all those years and would not have an issue.  But no.... they ignored all the warnings, continued collecting money from customers they knew they were about to screw over, and after 2-3 years of ultimate warnings from Apple that 32-bit was going away, they did NOTHING.  Inexcuseable.

The wrath that AccountEdge is receiving on Twitter from burned AccountEdge customers is 100% deserved.  AccountEdge has the nerve to cry to everyone that their codebase is "30-years old", yet in the next paragraph of their apology, they proudly announce that non-Catalina users and "upgrade to AccountEdge 2020"?!  Seriously, what makes 30-year-old code "2020"?

mac_dog

Sounds like adobe & quark back in the day. Making excuses for not upgrading their software when they had ample time to do so. 

pascal007

digitol said:

I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 

I guess I’ve been asleep during the whole five minutes of Apple history during which they bent over backwards. Seriously, now: bending over backwards for compatibility can be said for Microsoft, but never – ever – for Apple. Look at how many times the APIs have changed in the last 20 years, and how many times previous APIs have become deprecated. In that same time, on Windows, you can still use Windows Me apps in compatibility mode. (Try running Mac OS 9 apps – same era – for fun!!!) The owners of AccountEdge simply didn’t want to put any money in their MacOS code, and they decided to blame Apple. The one who came up with this pitiful excuse probably thought he was being “Einstein” brilliant, but forgot to test his brilliant excuse on knowledgeable individuals. In real life, AccountEdge management come across as a bunch of incompetent managers, because if there are difficult transitions to make in computing, the one from 32 bit to 64 certainly isn’t one. Even more so for an accounting software.