Sage Integrates PayPal into Accounting Software

Sage has announced it is adding support for PayPal as a payment option within Sage50Cloud accounting software.

Seamus Smith, executive vice president of global payments and banking for Sage, says organizations are increasingly being required to support a much wider variety of payment options within their accounting applications. Integrating those payment systems within an accounting application is becoming simpler because many of those payment services now have well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs), says Smith.

“It’s all part of the API economy,” says Smith.

In fact, integration has become a major theme for Sage. Earlier this month, Sage announced that it has added the ability to integrate Microsoft Outlook email client software with Sage accounting software, which makes it simpler to share invoices.

Smith says services such as PayPal are both complementary and competitive to existing banking services. Most of the funds moving through PayPal start out in one bank account or another. But as PayPal evolves, it’s clear the payment service is inserting itself between traditional banks and consumers. As customer behavior continues to change, it’s only a matter of time before paper checks and cash are increasingly replaced by electronic transactions. Neither checks nor cash are ever likely to completely disappear, but Smith says it’s apparent that payment services such as PayPal are in the ascendency.

All told, Smith says roughly $4 trillion a year is moving through Sage accounting software. Sage North America decided recently to exit the payment service business because rather than favoring one platform over another, Sage is now committed to eliminating as much friction as possible as organizations move funds wherever and however they best see fit, says Smith.

The good news is that as applications continue to evolve, much of the integration work required to achieve that goal is now being assumed by the application provider.