It is not possible to contact the sage 50 accounts service v32

For the last few days one of our customers who uses Sage Accounts v32 has been unable to open the software. As soon as they click Open Company Sage goes into a "Diagnosing connection issues" and then returns "It is not possible to contact the sage 50 accounts service v32. To continue to use Sage A50 Accounts, you must ensure that the service is running"

The Sage guidance is to restart your device and try again which achieves nothing at all. All firewall rules have been added, all URL's (despite the fact Chrome won't connect to insecure sites without a warning are included in the list by Sage...which isn't very clever)

My customer has Sage installed on a single device, with the database also installed locally. Daily backups are taken and saved to their server which has a cloud backup run daily.

It appear that the latest update to Sage Data Service Manager has wiped the last known connection data so the program is looking at a configure file within Sage which is blank, hence the "Diagnosing connection issues" error without even attempting to connect to the local database.

To resolve the issue, open Sage Data Service Manager from the Program Menu (this is usually within the Sage folder in the menu)

Once open, the server will be blank. Type the local computer name into the server field and click connect.

You may receive warnings from your anti-virus or firewall software as you are opening a network connection to your local machine. Allow the connections as without them you cannot connect initially to update the connection config file. Once all anti-virus or firewall processes have been approved, the Data Service Manager will connect to the local machine and identify your databases.

Once the Data Service Manager shows connected, open Sage Accounts again and Open your company. The Diagnosis connection issues should then have changed and you should then be able to access your data.

The customer has had 5 calls and 3 remote sessions with Sage which have resulted in Sage stating the issue is the local machine.

Quite clearly the issue is Sage Accounts and the latest update to the Sage Data Service Manager which wipes the connection data from a file within Sage. Once you have connected, the file is updated and when checking the Data Service Manager it shows as Disconnected, but as it is now looking for a database on the C Drive, not across the network, it then works fine.

Sage didn't even look at the Data Service Manager as part of the diagnostics process, which is why they couldn't fix it. That service is for multiple machines connecting to single source Sage Databases across a network, which my customer doesn't do, but the software is expecting them to.