Sage partners with GoCardless to provide customers with automated recurring and instant payments, and bank feed data, so they can build better businesses and save hundreds of hours of payment admin.
in monthly payments admin for customers using the Sage and GoCardless integration.
Payments doubled
in volume and value across 12 months thanks to partner integration.
150,000
payments processed per month for Sage's own billing.
Less than 1%
of payments fail within Sage's own billing.
Payments 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.
“Sage was born 44 years ago in Newcastle upon Tyne with the idea of automating accounting processes — and essentially defined the category,” said Gordon Stuart, SVP, Embedded Services, Sage. “Four decades later, we're still automating workflows in accounting, financial management and payroll, knocking down those barriers so businesses can thrive and focus on running their own business."
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 bank payments — both recurring and instant 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.
"Sage has dabbled in owning, operating and building payments capabilities of our own — so we have firsthand experience of the challenges in that world," said Paul Fairless, Fintech Partner Strategy and Business Development Director, Sage. “By partnering with GoCardless, we can focus on what we do best, like accounting workflows and HCM (Human Capital Management), while delivering a best-in-class payments experience without being held back by the cost and time of developing in-house.”
Many more Sage customers opt for GoCardless vs card
GoCardless enables Sage customers to digitise and automate payment authorisations and collections, and embed Direct Debit or Pay by Bank One-Off options to their invoices. This provides a cost-effective, reliable alternative to cards and other manual payment methods — and the adoption figures leave little doubt: this is exactly what Sage customers want.
“In the last 12 months, we've doubled the volume and the value of payments that we're processing because of the collaboration with GoCardless, who really emphasise a seamless customer journey,” said Gil Hall, Strategic Provider Manager, Sage.
We all pay our mobile phone or utilities by Direct Debit, so customers trust it's a solution that's going to work — and it's cost-effective, because there are no card charges. With Pay by Bank, the transaction is instantaneous and the money has moved, again with no high card fees attached. That really delights our customers.
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,” said Trina Pham, Director, Global Fintech, Payments & Banking, Sage. “We can rely on GoCardless Bank Account Data for extensive bank and market coverage and high quality data, all via open banking API connections. We've had feedback that Bank Account Data has saved customers a lot of time, with hours of manual data entry removed.”
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
Both Paul and Gordon believe the partnership with GoCardless extends beyond each company’s expertise in its respective field, with a high degree of mission overlap when it comes to helping small businesses become bigger ones.
“There's a great compatibility in ethos between Sage and GoCardless — very similar companies, very purpose driven,” said Gordon.
I think one of the biggest successes of our partnership is the way that we've shown up for customers and it's been a pleasure to see that develop.
“In the early stages, it was very much just a traditional partnership, but we've aligned on strategy and understanding exactly what it is that our customers are looking for,” added Paul. “We measure the success of our Fintech relationships through revenue, but also through customer churn and the benefit in terms of how we are improving customer outcomes. We see across the board improvements in all of those areas.”
