FNB and Sage partnership enables SMEs to securely automate business accounting

Local financial service provider FNB and Sage, a company that offers cloud business management solutions, have partnered to simplify the process of transferring financial transaction history to the Sage accounting solutions – at no cost to customers.

Businesses are now able to automate their bank account transactions to feed directly into their Sage accounting software via a secure and convenient API service

According to reports, this is the first banking service integration of its kind in the country between a bank and Sage’s accounting portfolio. The partnership is between FNB and Sage Business Cloud Accounting, Sage 50cloud Pastel, Sage 200 Evolution, and Sage Intacct.

Jesse Weinberg, SME Segment Head at FNB provides insight behind the aims of the partnership.

 “Our aim is to help our customers eliminate some of the manual and administrative processes associated with bookkeeping and bank reconciliations. This should save them time and money so they can focus on growing and running their business efficiently. Direct integration between our online banking services and Sage’s software offers SMEs the easiest and most secure way possible to carry out their bank account reconciliations, with no need for third-party integrations or compromising their bank login credentials.”

What does this mean for local SMEs?

The partnership will enable SMEs to share their financial transaction history with Sage via a secure application programming interface (API), seamlessly and automatically.

This process will not compromise SMEs’ online banking credentials and is facilitated through the direct bank feeds” service that will supply financial transaction history data directly into Sage accounting solutions.

The banking service with Sage automates the first part of the bank reconciliation process for customers, by linking their online banking accounts directly to their Sage solution. This allows online bank transactions to be automatically imported, categorised, and reconciled into the customer’s Sage software.

The direct bank feeds service is configured through FNB Online Banking, where customers can manage their consent and permissions to transmit their specific transactional history to Sage. In addition, SMEs must then assign and allocate those transactions within their Sage software.

FNB business customers using Sage accounting solutions can get financial transactions history fed through to the Sage platform periodically or set it to refresh automatically until they decide to stop the feed.

“This is a big technological milestone not only for FNB but for millions of SMEs that now have a simple, efficient, and more secure way to integrate their bank account transactions into their accounting software. Apart from the timesaving it will offer SMEs, who often spend hours downloading and uploading bank statements into their accounting software, this also represents a huge step towards increasing the level of “business financial inclusion” by removing a barrier for more informal or less “business-fluent” SMEs to increase their accounting recording keeping – ultimately helping them to produce financial statements for lending or investment for their businesses.” concludes Weinberg.

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Featured image: Austin Distel via Unsplash