Frequently asked questions
Less than to read
Can you give us a demo of Banking Service in other products?
Take a look at the Sage Accounting Bank Feeds video in What is Banking Service?.
This video shows you how to set up and process transactions in Sage Accounting, as well as how to match and create transactions.
It is worth noting that while the Banking Service team does work closely with product teams, we are not familiar enough with those products to give demos. Get in touch with other product teams if you need more detailed walkthroughs.
What’s the typical size of a development team implementing Banking Service?
As of November 2017, product teams that have integrated with us have typically had 2 to 3 developers and 1 to 3 testers. And they have working for approximately 3 to 6 months, depending on the scope of their integration.
Recommendation: If you’re a desktop product, the teams that have integrated before you have produced reusable UI components that will significantly reduce your effort. Ask us about the Common Component and the Rules Component.
Is it mandatory to use rules?
No, implementing Rules – accountant or client-side – is optional.
What’s meant by “sync accounting data” in the Architecture Overview?
This is for integration with accountants. We offer the ability for customers to mark their bank account as Managed by my Accountant. By linking the bank account, a consuming client-application can upload their account entities. For example, the list of customer, supplier, or nominal records in your product.
This means the accountant-application can manage the bank account on their client’s behalf. They can create rules, manually add Posting Instructions to transactions from the bank feed before releasing them to the client-application.
Sync accounting data refers to the periodic uploading of fresh data to Banking Service for this purpose.
How often is fresh transaction data made available to download?
It depends on whether the bank account is for a direct or indirect Bank.
Sage Demo Banks (both direct and indirect) can have transactions added at any time by using the Rules API.
Direct banks typically provide us data once a day (overnight UTC+0). The Banking Service platform checks and processes this data every 5 minutes.
Data for indirect banks is made available to us depending on the 3rd-party provider involved.
Yodlee make data available every 8 hours (staggered), and so Banking Service polls Yodlee every 8 hours. The theoretical worst-case scenario is that a Yodlee bank account will have fresh data available every 16 hours.
Plaid processes and notifies us of new data after they receive notification from the bank, following the below estimate:
- 50% delivered within 30 seconds
- 75% delivered within 5 minutes
- 95% delivered within 15 minutes
- 99% delivered within 60 minutes