Connecting Mucka to Sage means your clients, invoices and customer payments flow straight into Sage. Mucka stays where you raise an invoice; Sage is where your bookkeeper and accountant see it land.
Which Sage — this matters
Sage sells more than one thing, and only one of them can be connected to anything.
Sage Accounting (you might know it as Sage Business Cloud, or Sage One if you've been with them a while) is the online one. You log in through a browser. That's the one that connects.
Sage Sole Trader is the cheaper online one, aimed at people who aren't VAT registered. It looks very similar and it's easy to end up on by accident, but it's a different product underneath and Mucka can't connect to it. If you're on Sole Trader you'd need to move up to Sage Accounting.
Sage 50 is the older desktop program that installs on a PC in the office. It has no way for other software to talk to it over the internet, so we can't connect to it the way we connect to the others. If you're on Sage 50, tell us — knowing how many of you there are is what decides whether we take that on, and it's a much bigger job.
Which have I got?
Quickest way to tell, without digging through paperwork:
- A program you open on one particular computer — that's Sage 50.
- A browser, and the menu down the side says "Income tax" — that's Sole Trader.
- A browser, and you've got a chart of accounts or ledger accounts in your settings — that's Sage Accounting, the one that works.
If you're still not sure, the name is written at the top of the screen next to the Sage logo once you're logged in.
What it does
The same as the other three:
- Every client you add in Mucka appears in Sage as a contact.
- Every invoice you raise in Mucka lands in Sage, with your Mucka invoice number on it.
- When a customer pays, the payment goes across too — once you've told Mucka which bank account they pay into.
- Pay an invoice in Sage instead, and Mucka ticks it over to paid on its own.
- Ask Mucka "who owes me money?" and the answer comes out of Sage.
- And it goes the other way too — the customers already in Sage can be brought into Mucka.
Mucka stays where you do the work. Sage is where your bookkeeper and accountant see it land.
One thing that's different from Xero
Sage doesn't tell us the moment something changes the way Xero does, so when a customer pays you in Sage, Mucka picks it up on a check that runs every few minutes rather than instantly. FreeAgent works the same way and nobody notices.
There's also a quirk worth knowing if you use Sage for more than one company: Sage sends us whichever set of books it treats as your main one. Mucka shows you the name of the business it connected to on the Sage panel, so check that line says what you expect.
Your customers need an address
Sage won't accept an invoice unless the customer on it has an address. It's the one thing it's stricter about than Xero, and it's worth knowing before you find out the hard way.
So once Sage is connected, Mucka checks as you write an invoice. If the customer hasn't got an address you'll see a note by their name with a box to type one in — put it there and it saves onto the customer, so you only ever do it once for that person. Until it's filled in, Save & Send stays off.
You can still save the invoice as a draft. Drafts never go to Sage, so there's nothing to go wrong, and it means you can get the job written up now and chase the address later.
On Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent you'll see the same note, but it's only a suggestion there — those three take an invoice without an address quite happily, so you can skip it and carry on.
Setting it up
Two steps, and the second one takes about ten seconds.
Connect. Head to Settings → Connections → Integrations → Sage and tap Connect Sage. Sign in, approve it, and you're back in Mucka. Your whole customer list starts moving across straight away.
Pick your sales account. Tap Map accounts and choose which account in Sage your invoices should land in — for most trades that's simply "Sales". Until you've picked one, customers sync but invoices don't, because Sage won't accept an invoice that doesn't say where the money goes.
If you're VAT registered, pick your VAT rate on the same screen. Sage wants the rate spelled out on every line of every invoice and won't take one without it, so Mucka asks you for it up front rather than letting invoices bounce later. Pick the rate you normally charge — for most trades that's the standard 20%. If you're not VAT registered you won't be asked, and Sage uses its own default.
The bank account box decides what happens to payments. Pick the account your customers pay into and Mucka records each payment in Sage against the invoice, the moment you mark it paid. Leave it blank and Mucka won't record payments in Sage at all — you match them off your bank feed the way you do now. Invoices go across either way, and if you choose an account later, every payment that was waiting goes across within the hour.
"My invoices aren't going across"
Nine times out of ten one of those two boxes is empty, and everything else is working perfectly — your customers will be syncing across happily the whole time, which is what makes it look like something broken rather than something unfinished.
Two places tell you. The Sage panel shows a banner naming the box that's missing — the sales account or the VAT rate, whichever it is. And the invoice itself says Not in Sage yet, with the reason underneath it.
You don't need to re-send anything. Fill the box in, hit save, and Mucka goes back and pushes the invoices that were waiting. Give it a minute and they'll be sitting in Sage with their proper numbers on.
Bringing your existing customers in
If you've been running on Sage for years, you've got a customer list in there already, and you shouldn't have to type it into Mucka a second time.
Once Sage is connected you'll see Import from Sage on the same panel. It reads your whole Sage contact list, checks each one against the clients you already have in Mucka, and shows you exactly what it's going to do before it saves a thing. You can bring your old invoices over at the same time — they sit against the customer as history and never count towards your Mucka revenue figures.
Two things worth knowing before you run it:
- Sage keeps your suppliers in the same list as your customers. Your merchants come across marked as suppliers rather than turning up among your customers, so you can filter them out on the contacts page.
- Your Sage products and services don't come across. Just contacts and invoices. Mucka can't send a price list back out to Sage, and a one-way copy would drift apart the first time you changed a price, so it's better not to start one. Set your price list up in Mucka instead.
The full walkthrough is in Import your existing clients.
What happens after that
- Every client you add appears in Sage as a contact.
- Every invoice you send lands in Sage with your Mucka invoice number on it.
- Payments you record in Mucka go across too, into the bank account you chose.
- Pay an invoice in Sage instead, and Mucka ticks it over to paid within a few minutes.
You keep working in Mucka. Sage is where your bookkeeper and accountant see it land.
Want it sooner? Tell us you're on Sage. What we build next is decided by how many people are waiting for it.