Evolution POS — bank compatibility

Evolution is a point-of-sale system for professional services, built by Sage Pastel. A South African accounting package with a long corporate pedigree — and it is not sold in Australia at all.

Certified on Linkly, running on premise. Linkly reaches more acquirers than any other middleware in the market, which is why most POS start there.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Pastel's software has been around since 1989. Softline bought Pastel Software in January 1999, which made Softline the biggest accounting software vendor in southern Africa; Softline itself was founded in 1988 by Ivan Epstein and Alan Osrin on a R1,500 loan, with Steven Cohen alongside them, and it listed on the Johannesburg exchange in February 1997 at a R250 million market cap. The Sage Group bought Softline in 2003 and delisted it. The Softline name was finally retired on 1 February 2013 — Sage had been holding its own brand back locally because a South African insurance company already owned the association.

The product went Pastel Accounting, then Softline Pastel, then Sage Pastel, and the mid-market line was Pastel Evolution and then Sage Evolution. Sage eventually ran two editions of the same lineage: Sage 100 Evolution, pulled from new sales with direct support ending 30 December 2020, and Sage 200 Evolution, which is still developed and still shipping. Steven Cohen was running Sage Pastel Accounting as MD when Evolution 7 launched in 2014.

Here is why this one matters for an Australian merchant. Sage does not sell it here. Sage's Australian site lists Intacct, X3, 300 and People — no Evolution, no Pastel anywhere on it — and Sage's own region selector for Sage 200 Evolution covers Africa and the Middle East. It is also an ERP and accounting package rather than a point of sale, with no native till module, only third-party integrations. If this is on a quote in front of you in Australia, something is off and it is worth asking what exactly you are being sold.