Sage Intacct and IBM Sterling integration

What moves between them

Vendor and bill records move from Sage Intacct into IBM Sterling. Sage Intacct vendors are polled on a schedule and posted into IBM Sterling as trading partner references, so EDI routing rules can target them. AP bills are extracted from Sage Intacct, formatted for EDI standards (ANSI X12 810 invoices or 850 purchase orders), and delivered to IBM Sterling mailboxes for translation and trading partner distribution. The sync is unidirectional, pull-only, on a cadence tied to your accounting period or payment cycle.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector maintains separate sessions for Sage Intacct (keyed on senderId, companyId, and userId) and refreshes the sessionid every 50 minutes before expiry, checking for errormessage tags in every HTTP 200 response. On the IBM Sterling side, it targets the customer-provided host and port, authenticates with the configured account (non-admin user required), and polls GET /B2BAPIs/svc/mailboxMessages/ every 1-5 minutes to detect new documents. Vendors are mapped to IBM Sterling trading partners, and AP bills are transformed into the EDI format required by each partner's routing rules (typically 810 invoice or 850 PO). Retried operations use Sage Intacct's uniqueid flag for server-side deduplication, preventing duplicate posting. Every record carries a full audit trail, and failed postings are queued for replay.

A real-world example

A mid-sized food distributor runs Sage Intacct for accounting and Intacct for vendor management, and uses IBM Sterling to distribute invoices and purchase orders to 200+ suppliers via EDI (ANSI X12). Before the integration, the accounting team exported vendor lists from Sage Intacct and manually entered them into IBM Sterling's trading partner configuration, then exported AP bills and re-formatted them into EDI 810 for posting to Sterling. Month-end took two extra days as the team chased discrepancies between the two systems and re-keyed vendor address changes. With Sage Intacct and IBM Sterling connected, vendors flow automatically into IBM Sterling, AP bills are translated and routed on a daily schedule, and manual data entry steps are eliminated. The accounting team now spends month-end on analysis instead of re-keying.

What you can do

• •Poll Sage Intacct vendors on a schedule and post them into IBM Sterling as trading partner records.
• •Extract AP bills from Sage Intacct and route them to IBM Sterling for EDI translation and trading partner delivery.
• •Manage Sage Intacct XML session refresh and error handling so the 50-minute session timeout does not interrupt the sync.
• •Poll IBM Sterling mailboxes on a customer-configured schedule and extract EDI documents for downstream processing.
• •Maintain a full audit trail of every vendor, bill, and routing record with replay capability for failed postings.

Questions

Which direction do records move between Sage Intacct and IBM Sterling?

Vendors and AP bills move from Sage Intacct into IBM Sterling. Vendors are posted as trading partner references, and bills are translated into EDI format (typically 810 invoices or 850 purchase orders) for routing to suppliers. The flow is one-directional, pull-only, on a schedule you control.

How does ml-connector handle Sage Intacct's 50-minute session timeout?

ml-connector caches the sessionid after the initial getAPISession call and refreshes it before the 50-minute expiry window on the next operation. Session state is keyed on senderId, companyId, and userId, so multiple companies or users are isolated in-process. Refreshes are transparent to the flow runner.

What is required to connect to a customer's IBM Sterling instance?

IBM Sterling is on-premises or customer-managed cloud only, so the customer must provide the B2Bi host, port, and network access (VPN or DMZ). The credential must be a non-admin user account. ml-connector polls the REST API every 1-5 minutes and extracts documents via dedicated endpoints, requiring no outbound webhooks from IBM Sterling.