Three lists, and nothing else
The connector walks three lists of your company in Sage Accounting. Sales invoices, purchase invoices, and contacts, which in Sage hold your customers and your suppliers in one object with a type label.
Anything outside those three lists is never requested. The ledger, the journals, the chart of accounts, bank reconciliations and attachments are not part of its walk. This is not a filter applied to what it receives, since the connector does not go and fetch those lists at all.
So an AI plugged into your Kastel can answer on who invoices you, how often, for what amounts and with what payment status. It can say nothing about the contents of an invoice line by line, nor about the account a supplier is paid into.
Sage accepts a request for part of a record
Sage's interface lets you name the attributes you want back. The connector uses that on every call, and its request cites neither bank details, nor addresses, nor contact persons, nor invoice line items. Those fields therefore never leave Sage.
The difference with an accounting system that returns everything is concrete. When the interface cannot narrow its response, a bank account number does arrive at the connector, which then has to refuse to write it. The Pennylane page describes that case, where the refusal happens at the point of writing.
The connector still keeps the second barrier on Sage. It names the fields it writes and writes those only, so a record arriving with a field that was not requested would not be written either. We keep both, because the first depends on a publisher's interface and the second depends on nobody but us.
The exact scope, in two columns
Here is what the connector asks Sage for, and what it never asks for.
A contact's type deserves a word, because it is read and it is not trivial. In Sage the same object serves for a customer and for a supplier, and the type label is what separates them. The connector writes that label, without which an AI would confuse the people who pay you with the people you pay.
What you hold in Sage, and what the connector asks for
Every row can be checked at your end, by opening the record concerned in your own Sage.
| In your Sage | What the connector asks for |
|---|---|
| A sales or purchase invoice | The number, the date, the counterparty's name, the total and currency, the status |
| That invoice's line items | Nothing, the attribute is not requested |
| A customer or supplier record | The name, the type, the registration number, the tax number |
| That counterparty's bank details | Nothing, the attribute is not requested |
| Their addresses and contact persons | Nothing, the attribute is not requested |
| The ledger, the journals, the chart of accounts | Nothing, those lists are not walked |
| An attachment on an invoice | Nothing, it is not requested |
Five rows out of seven say the same thing, and that is the intended result. The connector asks Sage for enough to understand your commercial activity, and leaves at your end whatever would let someone pay a person or rebuild a spend in detail.
Who is entitled to read, and one answer for all your companies
The authorisation you grant Sage is a read authorisation, and it covers the whole of that company's accounts. There is no permission attached to one particular invoice, so there is nothing to inherit. The connector draws the most cautious conclusion available and makes nothing readable until an administrator has designated the department entitled to read the accounts, with a valid name and a department that genuinely exists in your organisation.
One Sage authorisation can cover several companies. The connector discovers them when you connect, keeps one key per company, addresses each by its own identifier on every call, and files their records separately. One subsidiary's accounts do not mix with another's.
This way of deciding who reads what applies to all your sources, not only to the accounts. It is what governing your own knowledge means here.
What happens when an invoice changes or disappears
Sage can say what has been created or changed since a given date, and the connector does not use that yet. Every pass therefore rereads all three lists in full. An unchanged invoice is recognised as such and is not rewritten, and a new invoice shows up on the following pass rather than the second it is recorded.
One precaution deserves naming, because it protects your data rather than our convenience. Sage pages its lists by page number. When a response announces more to come while returning the same page again, the pass fails loudly instead of carrying on. Without that rule, an incomplete reconciliation would conclude that the unread invoices had gone, which is the quietest way to lose data.
Deleting an invoice in Sage does not remove it from your Kastel. The connector marks the record as gone at the source and keeps it, with the same read rights as before, until an administrator carries out the erasure. That is how every source gathered in the connector catalogue behaves, and on an accounting source it is particularly welcome.
What this connector does not do
It does not do your accounting. It computes no balance, reconciles no payment, produces no return and writes nothing into Sage. The authorisation requested covers reading only, and the connector exposes no way to write.
The department entitled to read is a single one for all the companies connected. You cannot give one subsidiary's accounts to one department and another subsidiary's to a different department in the same installation. If your entities need different partitions, that is settled at installation and deserves to be raised beforehand.
A few of the attribute names in Sage's interface have not yet been checked against a real company. The consequence is bounded in one direction only: an attribute Sage does not recognise makes the record less complete, and it never makes it wider. We would rather write that down than let you find out.
A contact can be an individual. In that case the name written is a person's name, and the connector treats it no differently at that point. The name is kept because it is what gives the invoice its meaning, and the protection lies elsewhere, in the fact that nothing is readable before a department has been designated.
Tell us what you want an AI to know about your accounts.
Accounts are looked at closely, with your entities, your organisation and your obligations in view. Write to us with what you expect from an AI on that scope, and we will tell you what the Sage connector asks for, what it leaves at your end and what it will not do.
Get in touch
