Set up the Basics

Less than 5 minutes to read

Before you start developing, we need to make sure you have the following ready to go.

Set up a trial business for development

You can create trial businesses for all supported regions and for multiple subscription tiers of Sage Business Cloud Accounting. If you’re unfamiliar with the subscription tiers it’s worthwhile familiarising yourself with the differences in functionality to ensure the intended scope of your integration is applicable to the intended subscription tiers. Different Tiers

Below are links to create the trials, including links to the various product pages for further details on features each variant provides.

TIP:
You can use email services which support aliasing on the fly such as Google’s task-specific email addresses to help you manage multiple environments from the same email account/inbox.

Region	Information	Accounting Start	Accounting Standard	Accounting Plus
United Kingdom	Details	Sign-up	Sign-up	Sign-up
Canada	Details	Sign-up	Sign-up	Sign-up
Ireland	Details	Sign-up	Sign-up

Our API and the variants

Third mid tier released for UK May 2020

As Sage Business Cloud Accounting doesn’t impose usage limits on the number of times a specific feature can be used, there are different variants available to better cater to the different needs of our customers. These variants must be considered when you plan for your integration.

We have documented endpoint availability throughout our Open API specification available as the API Reference. In the reference you will find for each endpoint details of both the regions, and variants supported:

Endpoint availability

Checking which variant a customer is using

It is advisable when first handling a new connection in your integration to establish which subscription your customer is using to ensure compatability.

To find this you must make a GET request to businesses endpoint, providing the id of the desired business:

GET /businesses{business_id}

Part of the response will contain a subscriptions array which will show which variant the business is using. The variants listed below are those which you integration will need to consider:

Variant	Subscription ID	Notes
Start	START
Start	MICRO	Created via Partner Edition
Accounting Standard	ACCOUNTS	Businesses created before May 2020
Accounting Standard	ACCOUNTING	Businesses created after May 2020
Accounting Plus	ACCOUNTING_10	Tier available from May 2020

"subscriptions": [
        {
            "created_at": "2020-11-317T13:17:55Z",
            "updated_at": "2020-11-17T13:18:09Z",
            "displayed_as": "Accounting",
            "id": "ACCOUNTING",
            "active": true,
            "status": "paying",
            "accountant_pays": false
        }
    ],

Finally, it’s also good practice to ensure you check that the active property is set to true before proceeding with the setup of your integration. If false, display an error to the user advising the business isn’t active and handle the error, preventing the connection from proceeding.

This account allows you to register and manage your applications, obtain your client credentials and specify key details such as callback URLs.

You can sign up here using your GitHub account or an email address, and we have a guide to signing up here.

Postman

When first starting out with the Accounting API, we recommend you use a client such as Postman to learn and explore.

Next: Create an App

Set up a trial business for development

Our API and the variants

Checking which variant a customer is using

Sign up for a Sage Developer Account

Postman