The original product, EasyBusiness Systems, was developed for the
CP/M operating system in 1976 by Don Thomson, Ted Comfoltey, Keith Wales, and Norm Francis of Basic Software Group and distributed by Information Unlimited Software. This was ported to MS-DOS and the IBM-PC in 1983.
Computer Associates acquired Information Unlimited Software in 1983 and ran it as an independent business unit. In 1987, it implemented a multi-window interface to allow moving between different modules. Easy Business Systems was renamed Accpac Plus in 1987 with the release of version 5. Accpac became popular in Canada with support of Canadian public accounting firms that would sell and support the software. The name Accpac is an acronym for 'A Complete and Comprehensive Program for Accounting Control'. The first Windows version, CA-Accpac/2000, popularly known as ACCPAC for Windows, was developed in the early 1990s and released in October 1994. The Windows version marked the move to client/server and was developed with all new code in
COBOL with Computer Associates development tools (these components were redeveloped in 2001 in Accpac Advantage Series with a core business layer developed in
C and a user interface layer developed in
Visual Basic). In October 1996 ACCPAC for Windows 2.0 was released. In August 2001, the company presented ACCPAC Advantage Series 5.0, its first web-based version. The web interface was rebuilt in Sage 300 2016 for cross browser support, running on IIS with ASP.Net, a web
API was added in the 2017. Sage 300 initially ran on Btrieve Databases and then supported a variety of database backends. Since Sage 300 2016 only the MS SQL database is supported. Sage renamed it Sage Accpac ERP in 2006, then Sage ERP Accpac in 2009. Sage dropped the Accpac name in 2012 when it was renamed to Sage 300 ERP. ==Reception==