Sage Announces First Bank Feeds Partner

Accounting software company Sage is acting on U.K. tax reform in an effort to help SMEs ease into the transition of going digital.

The company said Monday (May 22) that it is working with Cashplus to help small businesses prepare for the Making Tax Digital legislation. Sage and Cashplus are integrating each other’s data to launch a new Sage tool called Bank Feeds, which means joint customers of Sage solutions and Cashplus business accounts can automate and streamline bank reconciliation to ensure accounts and records are up to date and accurate.

Bank Feeds, first announced by Sage earlier this month, connects directly to SME customers’ bank accounts to streamline access to financial data and reconcile that information with data in the Sage accounting platform. Cashplus is the first company to announce it is linking its account data into Bank Feeds.

Rich Wagner, CEO of Cashplus parent company APS Financial, said the collaboration aims to ensure SMEs are compliant with the U.K.’s digital tax initiative.

“As a market leader in FinTech, APS developed Cashplus to make life simpler for small and medium businesses,” he said. “Our partnership with Sage emphasizes this position. Small business owners will be ahead of the compliance curve, and with our tech partnership, they can focus on building their business rather than sitting through difficult and time-consuming admin.”

“We chose Cashplus to be part of the launch of Bank Feeds because of the company’s payments expertise and its prevalence in the U.K.,” added Sage EVP of Global Payments and Banking Seamus Smith in another statement. “We expect this to be one of the first steps in our journey toward enabling easy and better access to financial services from within the Sage Software.”

The launch of Bank Feeds and the partnership with Cashplus follow news earlier this month that Sage would be selling off its U.S. payments unit.