At Sage Business Cloud, we are always working hard to make sure processing your data is as quick and simple as possible. With that in mind, there are several features we have worked hard on to make this easier for you, as well as big plans for future updates throughout the new year as well.
New Features
Because of your feedback, we are very excited to announce the release of a brand new feature. Following over 100 customer votes, you can now add attachments to Sales Invoices and email them to your customers. This can then be sent to customers alongside your emailed invoices in one simple step – by making the attachment ‘visible’ or ‘hidden’ to your customer. If you choose to make it ‘visible’, the customer can access it via a link in the online version of the invoice, or embedded it in the email. Attachments can be anything, such as images, brochures and more. Please see our Help Guide for more information on how to add attachments to your Sales Invoices here.
Do you have another suggestion to make Sage Accounting even better? Tell us in our Ideas Hub here!
Making Repeat Invoices and Payments Simple
Did you know that you can also create a Recurring Sales Invoice? This simple process can save hours of time if you have repeat customers. You can create your invoices as normal, then set them as ‘recurring’. You can choose the frequency of the invoice as ‘Daily’, ‘weekly’, or ‘monthly’, and can even set it to recur ‘every 2 weeks’, or every 6 months’ for example. Ensuring your customers are always invoiced on time. You will have full control over the start and end dates of the recurrences, and should you need to pause or stop the recurring invoice, you can do so with just 2 clicks in your Recurring Invoices tab. To read more about how to set up Recurring Invoices, please see our Help Guide here.
To make paying your overheads much simpler, we also have Recurring Entries. These are bank payments or receipts that you can set up to repeat regularly as ‘Other Payments’ and ‘Other Receipts’; meaning they should only be used for transactions that you are not invoiced for, such as your direct debits for utilities. Recurring Payments can be easily identified in your bank activity by this symbol You can choose the frequency and amount of the Recurring Entry, as well as the ledger code. You can also choose the date of final posting, if you need your payments for only a set period of time. To learn more about Recurring Entries, please see our Help Guide here.
Automate your Bank
Bank Feeds have never been simpler, and we are continuously working on ways to make them even better for you. See our guide on how to connect your bank feed here. At the beginning of the year due to a legislation change, all banks were made to change the way they process bank feeds if they use a 3rd party. Because of this, bank feeds are now either Open Banking feeds via the 3rd party Plaid, or connecting direct to your bank. As a result, they are working better than ever. This means your bank will send us information on your transactions automatically. Your bank feed will update within a few days of your transaction, which you can then ‘match’ to an invoice or ‘create’ as a standalone transaction, saving you hours of time and preventing any transactions getting missed. Should you encounter any issues with your bank feed, we have an interactive troubleshooting guide to get to the root cause of the issue, and have you up and running as quickly as possible. If you are connecting a Bank Feed, see our troubleshooting guide here. If your feed doesn’t seem to be working as expected, you can follow this troubleshooting guide here.
Integrate Your Apps
What’s more, you can get paid faster, and chase late payments by integrating your Stripe account into Sage Accounting. Once integrated, your customers can simply click ‘Pay Now’ in their emailed invoices, which will then show as paid in full in your Sage account. The customer receipt will show in your Stripe account, with their fee automatically deducted, and this net value will post to your bank account. All without a click of a button – it couldn’t be simpler! To find out more on the benefits of using Stripe with Sage Accounting, see our guide here. Or arrange a call to set up an account here.
If that’s not enough, you can also link your Sage Accounting with your AutoEntry account – a cloud-based solution, which can eliminate data entry. When you link your AutoEntry account to Sage Accounting, you can scan documents, invoices, receipts and more, which will be automatically posted to Sage. Smart technology used by AutoEntry captures relevant data from your scanned documents such as contacts, descriptions and values, to create the transactions for you. Find out more about integrating AutoEntry with Sage here. If you don’t already have an AutoEntry account, why not enquire about a free demo here?