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.
On Sage Accounting Start
Start is the cheapest Sage Accounting plan, and it doesn't let other software set a due date on an invoice — it turns the whole invoice away if one is sent. So on Start, Mucka sends your invoice without the due date and Sage works it out from the customer's payment terms in Sage instead. Mucka writes the real due date into the invoice's notes in Sage, so your bookkeeper can still see when it was meant to be paid.
You don't need to do anything for this. If an invoice was turned away for it before, tap Sync invoices now on the Sage panel and it goes across.
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.
If Sage has already turned an invoice away for this, add the address to the customer and it goes across on its own within the hour. Mucka updates the customer in Sage first, so it doesn't matter whether you typed the address on their page or told Mucka in the chat. Tap Sync invoices now on the Sage panel if you'd rather not wait.
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 parts: sign in, then three quick questions, one per screen.
Connect. Head to Settings → Connections → Integrations → Sage and tap Connect Sage. Sign in, approve it, and you're back in Mucka with Set up Sage already open. Your whole customer list starts moving across straight away. Nothing goes to Sage until you press Start sending to Sage on the last question, and if you close it before the end, the Sage panel says what's missing and Finish setting up takes you back in.
Where do your sales go? 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 it's optional, and Sage uses its own default.
When a customer pays you, how should Sage hear about it? Mucka asks this once, and won't move on until you've answered, because leaving it blank used to mean nothing at all: payments just sat in Mucka waiting for an answer nobody had been asked for. Two answers:
- I match them off my bank feed in Sage. Mucka leaves your payments alone, and you match them in Sage the way you always have. Mucka won't mention it again.
- Mucka writes them into Sage. Pick the bank account your customers pay into, and Mucka records each payment in Sage against its invoice the moment you mark it paid, which saves you the reconcile. If there's only one bank account in your Sage, Mucka picks it for you.
Invoices go across either way.
What about invoices you've already raised? Send them across sends every invoice raised in Mucka that isn't in Sage yet. Only invoices from today sends nothing from before, useful when your accountant has closed that period.
The last screen confirms it's set up and lists your answers, each with Change beside it, and offers two next steps: bring your Sage customers into Mucka, or raise an invoice and watch it land. To change an answer later, tap Change setup on the Sage panel.
"Payments haven't reached Sage"
If you take a payment in Mucka before you've answered that question, the Sage panel in Settings tells you how many payments are waiting and how much they come to. Nothing is lost: Mucka holds on to them. Tap Change setup, pick your bank account, and every payment that was waiting goes across within the hour. Choose the bank feed instead and the message goes away, because that money is already on its way to Sage through your bank feed.
"My invoices aren't going across"
Nine times out of ten setup isn't finished: the sales account or the VAT rate is still 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. Tap Finish setting up, answer the question, 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.
"My invoice numbers don't match Sage"
Sage gives every sales invoice a number of its own, from its own counter. Your Mucka number — the one on the invoice your customer got — goes across in Sage's Reference box. Most of the time the two counters move together, so you never notice.
They drift apart when a Mucka invoice never gets to Sage. A draft only goes across when you send it, so a draft you leave sitting (or delete, or void before sending) has used up a Mucka number that Sage never saw. From then on, each invoice is one number ahead in Mucka.
When that happens the invoice in Mucka tells you: it says In Sage as SI-593 (or whatever Sage called it) rather than just In Sage.
To put them back in step, open Sage's invoice settings and set its next invoice number to the same as your next one in Mucka (Settings → Business → Paperwork, under Numbering, in Mucka). Invoices already in Sage keep the numbers Sage gave them — Sage won't renumber one — but your Mucka number is on each of them in the Reference box, so you can always match them up.
The easiest way to avoid it: if you've raised an invoice from a quote and left it as a draft, finish that one off rather than raising another. Mucka will point you at the draft if you try.
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.
Three 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.
- Sage only gives each customer one name, so Mucka works out who's a household and who's a business. A customer named like a person ("Sue Pargeter", "Carl and Maisie") comes across as a household; one that reads like a business ("The Oban Inn", "Ashford Kitchens and Bathrooms", anything ending Ltd) comes across as a company. A one-word business name like "Physiofit" can't be told apart from a first name, so it lands as a household. Open it and switch it to a company if it's wrong.
- 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.
- Change the lines on an invoice in Mucka after it's gone across (a price, a quantity, an extra line) and Sage gets the change too, as long as nothing has been paid against it in Sage. Mucka sends your lines as they are in Mucka, so a price you changed in Sage itself is replaced by Mucka's. It leaves Sage alone if the invoice has been paid there or has a discount or extra charge added in Sage, it won't take a line off for you, and it won't move an invoice's date or customer. For any of those, make the same change in Sage.
- 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.
Want your sales split?
Everything Mucka sends over lands in the one ledger account you picked above. If you'd rather see installations and servicing separately in your profit and loss, you can give each its own — see Split your sales across more than one account. Optional, and off unless you turn it on.