Sage has retired every edition of BusinessVision effective 31 December 2026. After that date there are no updates, no fixes, no security patches and no support, and critically no further payroll calculations or compliance updates. The software will still open on 1 January. That is the part that catches people out.
Reviewed 1 September 2026. We keep this page current because the answer changes as the date approaches.
This is the sharp edge and the reason the date is not negotiable. After retirement there are no further payroll calculations and no compliance updates. Sage has said the last payroll update lands in July 2026, with a year-end update in November or December 2026 for T4 and T5018. Run a pay period into 2027 on BusinessVision and you are calculating source deductions with rates nobody is maintaining.
No updates, no fixes, no security patches. An unpatched finance system holding customer and payroll data is a different risk conversation with your insurer and your auditor than it was the year before.
Support ends with the product. A problem in February 2027 is a problem you and your partner solve alone, with no vendor behind you and no fix coming.
Nothing switches off on 1 January. BusinessVision will still open. That is exactly what makes the date easy to ignore, and why the risk arrives quietly, as a compliance problem in a payroll run rather than as an outage.
Every page you will find on this subject tells you the deadline and tells you to act. Almost none of them tell you whether you still can, because that answer requires having a migration actually running rather than a marketing page about one.
Not yet, but the slack is gone. We have BusinessVision to Spire migrations in flight right now. One of them began with initial system access at the end of June and is in its final stage. Roughly three months of elapsed time is a realistic shape for a mid-size move.
Measured from today, that still lands inside the year. It leaves very little room for the schedule to slip, and it assumes you can give the work attention through the autumn rather than starting it in December. If your year end is 31 December, note that you also get a cleaner cutover by landing before it rather than during it.
We describe those engagements without naming the businesses because we do not put client names on this site without their written consent.
The schedule is rarely set by the tooling. It is set by decisions only your business can make: how many years of history to carry across, which reports have to be rebuilt rather than moved, who signs off the opening balances, and how much of your current data gets cleaned on the way through instead of carried over as it stands.
Those are the conversations to start now, because they are the ones that do not compress. The technical work has a floor; the decision-making does not have a ceiling.
Our implementation process, the six deliverables and what each one covers, is set out on the Spire ERP implementation page.
If you are still on BusinessVision, the useful conversation right now is about timing, not about software. Tell us your year end and how many years of history you need to keep, and we will tell you honestly whether the date is still reachable.