Introduction
The Loc8 to Sage integration gives you the opportunity to create invoices from your Loc8 account and send out those invoices from within your Sage account to customers through Sage's invoicing lifecycle without having any need to duplicating your company's financial data in Sage such as tax rates and Chart of Accounts or any of your customer contacts.
You can instantly notice your jobs getting invoiced faster, giving you the opportunity to increase your cash flow with insights into profits per work order, invoice status, payments due and payments received.
Activating the Loc8 to Sage Integration
To do so, see the steps mentioned in the article, Activate Integration between Loc8 and an External App.
Financial configurations during the activation process
The integration process with any financial accounting software will provide you the flexibility of defining what data should the two systems exchange on routined sync-up.
For Sage Australia, the configurations are as shown below:
How will you know if the integration is active at anytime
Go to the Integrations area and check if the Sage app is added and is in Active state.
You will also see that the timestamp against the Last successful poll matches closely to your system's UTC clock. This is a positive indication that the integration is running its periodic checks to ensure the required data is up-to-date on both the systems.
What happens in Loc8 upon integration
You will notice important changes in your Loc8 account that’s relevant to invoicing:
All of your existing tax types are replaced by the tax types and corresponding tax rates defined in Sage if synchronising invoices between Loc8 and Sage is turned ON. To view the new tax types, go to Settings -> Company and scroll down to the Financial section.
The customers created in Loc8 will be synchronise to Sage and any customers in Sage can also be synchronise into Loc8 depending on what synchronise option is turned ON.
What initiates a Loc8 invoice to appear in Sage
While the integration is active, any invoice created in Loc8 (after the integration was enabled) will be available in Sage, but only on the condition that you manually change the status of the invoice from Draft to Pending Payment.
Wait for a moment for the integration to pick up the new invoice and sync with Sage. Meanwhile, open your Sage account and go to the Invoices section. In the example of a Sage account below, we will access the invoices through Customers -> Transactions -> Customer Tax Invoices.
Soon you will find the new invoice in Sage, intact with its Invoice ID, customer name, payment amount, etc.
You can now continue with sending the invoice to the customer as per your usual process in Sage.
Invoice Status in Loc8 during integration
While Sage has its own invoice lifecycle where:
You review the invoice and create a receipt
On receiving a payment you record the amount against a Bank Account
And, that sets the invoice status in Sage to Paid if there is no balance due.
In Loc8, the invoice will directly progress from Pending Payment to Paid status as soon as the integration synchronises the financial data from the time the Invoice was Paid in Sage.
Track the integration activities in History Log
Any changes that are being made while the integration is active, is constantly logged in History. The detailed logs also prove to be an excellent tool for troubleshooting any sync issues.
To access the History, go to Settings -> Integrations and open the app information.
You will then have to follow the same procedure as discussed above till all the invoices are Paid for the job.
To learn more about invoicing, see the article Manage an Invoice.