In some scenarios, you may experience poor performance or even disconnection's when using Sage 200 Standard / Sage for Education.

There are a lot of different factors which could contribute to a drop-in performance and the following guide is designed to help diagnose the cause of performance problems.

We recommend your internal IT team reviews this guide and collate information prior to creating a support query with your Sage Technical provider.

Troubleshooting basics

Are any errors being reported?

• Take screenshots of any errors encountered (make a note of the date and time the error(s) was received).
• Check if the error has been recorded in the 200 Standard Knowledge Base.

Are you only seeing problems for certain PC's or certain users?

• Do the computers involved meet Minimum Requirements?
• Does the problem follow users or is it consistent on particular PCs?
• Do you have more than one site\network, or any remote workers?
• Does your site(s) meet the Minimum Internet Connection Requirements?
• Are your Security and Firewall Settings settings configured correctly for all sites?

Is there a connectivity Issue?

• Check https://trust.sage.com/ for the service status for your Sage product.

  If an issue is reported follow any instruction given and/or check the trust site regularly for updates.

• Assess Line Bandwidth and Contention to determine if the problem may be due to your Internet connection.

Is there a pattern to the performance problem?

• Are the problems re-creatable at will? (i.e. it is always slow if I tab from field A to B).

  Record the steps to replicate and notify your Sage Support provider.

• Is there consistency or commonality around the performance issue? (e.g. they occur at the same time of day or in the same area of the software).

Benchmarking

In Product Benchmark

There is a Benchmark option in About Sage 200 which sends data packages of various sizes between the desktop and the server, measuring response times for each size.

This option is a useful indicator on the quality of the connection to the server, as a general rule we would expect the system would reach the maximum wait time of 10 seconds when processing the 1.00 MB Package (or greater).

The performance can differ because of factors such as your Internet bandwidth or latency so it is advisable to run the Benchmark option at a time when the system is performing normally to compare to the results when there is a dip in performance.

To run this option:

1. Go to the Tools (cog in top right corner).
2. Select About Sage 200.
3. Click Benchmark.
4. Click Run Benchmark.
5. Use the Copy to Clipboard option and paste the results into a notepad or Microsoft Word document to keep a record of the results.

Internet Speed Benchmark testing and Performance testing

In some scenarios following the above will not fully resolve the issue and following the below steps may help us gather more information.

In order for us effectively investigate the cause of a problem it can be necessary to capture information at the time which the problem occurs.

Download the Sage 200 Performance Issue Log and make a record whenever performance issues occur.

Use this file to capture the information you record during your tests.

We recommend running Speed bench marking 3 times per day at busy times to get a true representation of the bandwidth usage.

In the example case above, two times are contributing to the issues:

1. Friday afternoon has a large drop in bandwidth, when investigated it was found that the customers IT department had used the time to carry out network maintenance this coincided with all of the users’ need to use the program to process payments therefore performance suffered.
2. On Sunday as usual one of the users worked from home, unfortunately their connection does not meet the minimum requirements and they experienced performance issues and crashes.

Further Steps

Log files

More information can sometimes be recovered from the application or Windows Event logs, you may wish to speak to your IT support provider in retrieving and examining these logs.

The Sage 200 application log file location is C:\ProgramData\Sage\Sage200. Further information on Sage200Desktop.log the log files please refer to article .

See article for advice on using Windows Event Viewer to help troubleshoot unexpected program crashes.

Once you have gathered all of the information above you can contact the technical support team on 0191 479 5955.