Pegasus Opera II End of Life: Why you need to upgrade to Opera 3

Casting your mind back to 2001 when Pegasus launched Opera II, the year began with Bob the Builder at number 1 with the smash hit (ahem) ‘Can We Fix It?’

If you were ahead of the game you might have had the top-selling Nokia 8855 to call your friends and arrange to see the first Harry Potter movie with a baby-faced Daniel Radcliffe.

Maybe your super-trendy PC monitor looked something like this…as wide as it was long!

There were some good points from 2001 (the success of Harry Potter) and some bad trends (Bob the Builder topping the charts and monstrous PC monitors), but technology has advanced significantly and it’s time to move on with it. You probably still don’t have a Nokia 8855, so why would you still be operating on an ERP system that came about at the same time?  Well, how time flies….

Pegasus announced today that Pegasus Opera II Payroll will no longer be updated after the February 2018 release, signalling the forthcoming Pegasus Opera II end of life. This is an announcement that has long been in the works as Pegasus has continued to focus developments on Opera 3, and with the lack of support on newer technologies such as Windows Server 2016.

As there will be no more Payroll updates in Opera II, any customers on the platform must upgrade to Opera 3 prior to February 2019 to remain compliant with HMRC.

We have been encouraging customers on Opera II to upgrade to Opera 3 for some time, largely due to Opera II becoming more costly and less secure. This is now going to be the case more than ever before. The sooner you upgrade to Pegasus Opera 3, the better.

For a while now, staying on Opera II has meant no more additional modules or new features, fewer integrations and no opportunity to utilise the cloud. But going forward, putting off your upgrade will significantly increase costs and risks associated with staying on Opera II. Your Annual Maintenance Contract will increase significantly as time goes on, as will the cost of upgrading to Opera 3 the longer you wait; Pegasus is planning on increasing the price by 10% from April 2018, so the sooner customers upgrade, the better.

Upgrading to Opera 3 is an easy process that requires very little downtime, so there’s minimal disruption to your business. To upgrade to Opera 3 as soon as possible, get in touch with TSG. We will be performing customer upgrades between September 2017 and January 2018, and April 2018 onwards; the period in-between will be busy as we support customers with mandatory Payroll upgrades.

But if avoiding increasing costs and security issues aren’t at the top of your list, you might like to find out more about the functionality you’re missing out on by staying on Opera II. Here’s why Pegasus Opera 3 is a far more powerful option for your business.

Export to Excel

You can export reports to Excel and use them for a number of functionalities including data manipulation, reporting, or whatever else you please; this functionality, which is only available with Opera 3, gives you the freedom and the flexibility to do what you want with your data.

Retrospective Aged Debtors and Creditors

To help with your end of year auditing, Retrospective Aged Debtors and Creditors allows you to re-run your Debtors and Creditors reports using historical data based on a date from the past. This allows you to look at historic debt from a certain period and comes in useful for period or year-end audits.

Rectifications

Pegasus Opera 3 also gives you the flexibility of rectifying a number of submissions including Sale Receipts, Nominal Journals and Purchase Payments. This allows employees to correct data submissions, simplifying the accounts process and removing the need for rekeying information.

Open Period Accounting

Open Period Accounting gives you the flexibility to post your Nominal Ledgers in various periods, past and present. You can choose whether the periods on your Nominal Ledgers are open, closed or blocked for postings. You can keep these periods open as long as you need, or close them at the end of the financial year. This allows you to create financial calendars for the previous and current periods, and for an additional 3 years in the future, meaning you can post in these periods without changing Pegasus Opera 3’s system date. You’re able to post to various Nominal Ledger periods from Nominal, Sales and Purchase Ledgers, Stock Control, Fixed Assets and Payroll.

Stocktake module

For any business offering goods and products, stock taking is essential to managing your stock levels. You can use these to check against stock manually, and for every item that has a different amount to that in Opera 3, an adjustment will be made automatically; this means there’s no need to manually enter adjustments, saving valuable time.

Automated tasks including backups with Scheduler

Pegasus allows you to schedule automatic backups – essential to the security of your data in the event of a catastrophe. This takes the time out of manually running backups and allows your employees focus on their essential day-to-day work. Scheduler also allows you to automate a number of other processes including period ends, reporting, repeat invoices and Sales Order Process reorganisations.

Payroll Self Service

Within the Payroll & HR module and operating on the Pegasus Web Xchange, Payroll Self Service allows employees to proactively access their personal data. This includes pension details, holiday information and payslips and P60s. Employees can update their personal information, but what they can update is controlled by managers and administrators. This feature can save your HR and finance department significant amounts of time; why not use Pegasus’ ROI calculator to see how much tangible money you could be saving by using this feature?

That’s not all…

These features are only scratching the surface of the value Pegasus Opera 3 can offer you. We could pull together an entire document with detailed information on what you’re missing out on by remaining on Opera II…but luckily, Pegasus has already done this in its handy Opera 3 upgrade guide. In here you’ll find in-depth information about all of the features available in Opera 3 that aren’t on Opera II, including the Credit Management Centre, Salary Sacrifice, Email Payslips, direct links to HMRC and many more features we haven’t covered in this blog.