When Small Business Owners need to upgrade their company’s software, hard decisions need to be made. How will the upgrade affect the company? Will employees be able to work while this upgrade takes place? Last but not least, how much will the upgrade cost?
In the last few years our company decided to wait on upgrading many of the software programs we use. Autodesk AutoCad / Revit are one of them. In the past we could always upgrade when it was necessary. This time we were told there were no options to upgrade, as Autodesk had changed their upgrade policy. That policy being: Software purchases older than a year would not be allowed to renew their software licenses. New software would have to be purchased to receive the upgrade. In other words, the software we have was not bought within the last year, making our request to upgrade null and void. We were not made aware of this new upgrade policy, and had missed Autodesk’s internal deadline. While negotiating with Autodesk and informing them that we had not been made aware of their policy change, they finally agreed to allow us to upgrade our software at the new rate, plus a few extra costs. We appreciate all that Autodesk did to fix this issue. They in turn reviewed their communication policies, giving other businesses time to prepare for this change. A few weeks later we received an email from Autodesk informing its’ customer’s that upgrades would only be available for the first year they owned the software.
The cost of most software programs we use is very excessive, and unfortunately this is one item can make or break a small businesses budget. That means if your business is slow on work and cash flow, it’s possible your software will go out of date and you will need to buy the new software, as if from scratch. That might mean spending $10K in lieu of $1K. How are small companies going to adjust their cash flow to this new reality? It is another fact in America that if you are not a large company with great cash flow you are a second rate citizen fighting to stay in the game. Good luck to all the SBE companies out there!
