Sage
Sage partners with GoCardless to provide customers with automated recurring payments and bank feed data, helping them to build better businesses and save hundreds of hours of payment admin.
About
Accounting software
Office locations
Payer locations
Key benefits
150,000
payments per month go through GoCardless.
Less than 1%
of payments fail with GoCardless.
Payments and data that push businesses forward
Sage is an industry leader in accounting, payroll, and HR software, and millions of small- and medium-sized businesses across the globe depend on its solutions.
“We enable customers to harness digitisation to remove friction in their business processes and in their relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, banks, and government agencies,” said Chip Mahan, Global Head of Fintech, Payments & Banking, Sage.
Sage expands its reach and impact by working with a broad and robust ecosystem of partners to bring complementary services and capabilities into its core accounting platform.
GoCardless is one of Sage's Strategic Partners, helping to simplify accepting Direct Debit payments for Sage customers and making open banking data available for automated accounting reconciliations. Sage also collects payments from its own customers via GoCardless, which has been a key enabler as it pivots to a cloud-based subscription model.
“When any company wants to add a service or solution they need to decide whether to build, buy, or partner,” said Chip. “In scenarios that are outside our core competency it makes sense to work with a leader in its field like GoCardless, whose proven solutions provide customers with access to digital payments and bank feed data to drive automatic collections and reconciliations.”
Many more Sage customers opt for GoCardless versus card
GoCardless enables Sage customers to digitise Direct Debit authorisations and collections and embed a Direct Debit option to their invoices. This provides a cost-effective, reliable alternative to cards and other manual payment methods.
GoCardless takes minutes to set up in Sage and gives customers access to a payment choice they otherwise wouldn't have – and one that costs much less than cards, and has a high level of reliability and consumer trust, so is ideally suited for recurring payments.
“In the UK, many more of our customers use GoCardless and part of this success is down to the fact they can set it up and almost forget about it," added Chip.
The integration means payments are automatically collected on invoice due dates and then automatically reconciled once received. This saves Sage customers from potentially hundreds of hours of monthly payments admin, depending on the size of their business.
Open banking data means user-friendly reconciliations
Sage has also integrated GoCardless Bank Account Data with its bank feeds feature in Europe and the UK. This solution uses open banking APIs to automatically pull customers’ daily transactions into the Sage platform, making account reconciliation easier without labour-intensive file uploads or manual data entry.
“Historically, it's been difficult for customers to access good quality data; they want to know that they have trusted information going into their product. What we're seeing now with GoCardless is that the data is more reliable and there's less chance of banks stopping access to data,” said Trina Pham, Director, Global Fintech, Payments & Banking, Sage.
“We can rely on GoCardless Bank Account Data for extensive bank and market coverage, all via open banking API connections. It delivers essential functionality that customers both need and expect for their business operations. Automatically pulling bank data significantly simplifies and streamlines the reconciliation process, which is traditionally time-consuming, making it more efficient and user-friendly for our customers.”
We've had feedback that Bank Account Data has saved customers a lot of time, with hours of manual data entry removed. We've also seen customer satisfaction and NPS improving where we've made Bank Account Data available, or where the experience prior to that wasn't great.
Reliable payments at serious scale
Sage uses GoCardless to bill hundreds of thousands of its own customers for their annual, quarterly or monthly subscription fees.
“We're 98% SaaS now so we’re heavily reliant on recurring revenue,” said Steve Barr, Order to Cash Lead, Sage. “Working at that scale and with relatively low-value payments, efficient and reliable payments are vital — and that’s what we get from GoCardless.”
Around 150,000 payments go through GoCardless, and less than 1% fail. Of those, automatic retries from GoCardless successfully collect 65%, so ultimately only a very small amount of payments completely fail.
Because GoCardless integrates directly with Sage’s billing platform and its wider systems, it can also automate communications with customers whenever a payment fails.
“By sending GoCardless’ payment failure reason codes to our billing platform and the Sage data lake, we can trigger specific outreach to those customers, with guidance on what to do if a payment has failed or if there’s an issue with the mandate,” said Steve.
These payment and process efficiencies mean Sage can scale, grow and offer new products without adding headcount to its finance teams.
We’d need an army without GoCardless – maybe hundreds of people – to follow up on customers’ late or failed payments.
Partners with a shared mission
Chip believes the partnership with GoCardless extends beyond each company’s expertise in its respective field, with a high degree of mission overlap.
“We're both trying to solve similar challenges for customers around saving time and money, and we’ve built a very strong relationship with GoCardless as a result,” he said.
It helps that GoCardless is very easy to work with. They're nimble, they understand ERP platforms like Sage, and we work seamlessly together.
On the day-to-day level, the work of continuously improving the Sage platform is never done. Here, GoCardless’ experience and support is also a major contributor to Sage’s success.
“GoCardless has been a good resource for benchmarking market trends and technology developments,” said Trina. “This helps us ensure we’re offering the right solutions for the right pain points for customers.”
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