Our expectations

In order to ensure the team can support you as efficiently and effectively as possible, we expect all of our developers to have familiarised themselves with the following prior to contacting us.

The expectations wheel

1. Prepare

When starting your development with Sage Business Cloud Accounting, begin with the Quick Start Guide.This takes you through the processes required to get up and running and successfully make your first request.

As part of getting started, you to register your application record with us in order to receive your applications credentials (Client ID, Secret key etc.) please see Create an App.

Ensure you have access to developer accounts/trials of the software for testing, that mirrors what your customers use.

2. Use available resources

Before contacting us please ensure you have reviewed all digital resources online before raising a new case. This includes:

• The Sage developer portal site for Accounting
• Application help provided by Sage for Accounting
• The Sage Developer Community

3. Appropriate troubleshooting

You must perform your own troubleshooting prior to contacting us to establish if the issue is data, product or environment specific and it is essential that you let us know of any fault finding/ problem solving processes you have carried out so far.

These are guidelines only but will provide structure around your troubleshooting methodology. If there has been insufficient troubleshooting, we could request that further investigation is completed before proceeding with the case.

• Have you tested your request in Postman?
• Have you tested your request in a different business or trial account?
• Have you tested your request in a different region of Sage Accounting?
• Have you isolated the section of your request that’s causing the unexpected results?
• What exceptions are appearing, and do you understand the details?
• Can any of your colleagues assist you?

4. Support boundaries

We support a number of scenarios but there are some boundaries to the support that we can offer.

Supported

• The API endpoints.
• How to get set up.
• Issues with authentication.
• Errors when making requests.
• Application advice when it relates to the use of the API (settings that could impact API responses etc.)

Unsupported

• Development with specific languages, we can only support the endpoints.
• Accounting application processes are not supported by the team, for support visit the application help site.
• Any improvements or ideas for the application or API should be directed to the ideas board.

5. Code examples

Our documentation contains test request examples, but you sometimes might have scenarios that go beyond these. Where possible, we’ll provide you with a custom example. In most cases, this will be a pseudo-code example to highlight how you can approach the solution. We ask that you check any code provided to ensure that it is production safe as we can’t take responsibility for any code provided.

6. During the case

Once a case has been opened, please contact the assigned technician for any case queries or additional information so we can keep track of the case. Also, if you need to query the status of the case, please contact the assigned technician as duplicate cases could cause confusion and slow down the resolution of the case.

If we ask any questions about you case, please answer as fully as possible.

7. Follow up

We would ask for you to let us know if the solution provided resolved the problem, if not what the alternative solution was. This will assist us in helping you, your developers and the community.

For cases where we have requested more information, we really need this to progress the case. Sometimes we might send you a reminder email and if no response is received, we’ll close the close.

8. Feedback

Once we’ve closed your case, you might receive a survey from us. We’d love it if you could complete the survey and provide as much detail as possible to help improve the service in future. We appreciate all comments and ensure that they are shared with all involved.

If you have any further comments and feedback regarding the survey process, please email Partner Feedback.

9. Behaviour

We are here to work in partnership with you. Remember, we’re all here to service the customer and we should all have their best interests at heart, striving for extraordinary customer experience.

The Developer Services team reserves the right to decline support to anyone who does not have the required development experience or who conducts themselves in an unprofessional manner towards members of the Developer Services Team.

Sage is committed to providing world class service in line with our values and corporate vision and we appreciate any feedback you can provide. Should you encounter a problem with the product, we would expect detailed replication steps to be submitted in order for us to formally report the issue as a defect.

Escalation process

One of the most critical aspects of raising an incident is to understand the impact that this issue is having on you or your customer. This will help us to prioritise the issue.

Below are a number of questions to help determine a business impact and therefore the severity. Please feel free to include any other information that could help us to prioritise the case.

• How often is the affected area of the product used?
• Is it fundamental to a process or part of a wider process?
• How many users are affected?
• Are there short-term alternatives to the problem?
• Does the affected area have consequences to the business (people/productivity/financials)?
• Is there an acceptable workaround to the issue?

Ongoing case enquiries

If you have questions about an ongoing case, please contact your assigned technician and include the case reference number that you’ve been provided with.

If we find an issue we can’t resolve

Sometimes, we’re unable to resolve an issue without some help from our development team. If this happens, we’ll let you know that the issue is being escalated and may need further information from you or permission to access data to help us resolve this.

Once we’ve passed this to the team, the issue will then undergo a review to assess if and how we can resolve the issue. Where possible we’ll add it to our next product release and let you know when you can expect this to be resolved.