Apron now integrates with FreeAgent
Save time, get cleaner records with a two-way sync between bills and books.
Apron’s document capture, bill pay and team expenses platform now integrates with FreeAgent, making it a breeze for business owners and finance teams to manage the whole life of a payment in one connected workflow.
You can now connect your Apron account to FreeAgent, so that any bills you upload to one will appear automatically in the other. It means less time spent manually uploading documents, and because Apron tracks down missing documents and receipts for you, less time chasing, too.
New to Apron? Here’s what that means
It all starts with invoice capture. Instead of keeping all of your invoices and receipts in paper form, or scattered across different inboxes, you bring them all together in Apron. Either upload them manually through the app, email or WhatsApp, or let Apron track down missing documents for you. That includes retrieving invoices from inboxes you connect, and chasing staff for their expense receipts.
Here’s where William AI comes in. Built into your Apron workflow, William finds, extracts, categorises and publishes documents to your bookkeeping software, which now includes FreeAgent.
Paying bills and managing team expenses with Apron is already a breeze for over 20,000 UK businesses and thousands of accountants and bookkeepers. For FreeAgent users, automatic reconciliation is now part of the package.
Not familiar with our cashback expense cards? Explore Apron Card.
Xero, QuickBooks, now FreeAgent
Apron users have always been able to connect Xero and QuickBooks, but we’ve been eager to offer a FreeAgent integration for some time. FreeAgent is popular with accountants and bookkeepers, but also with small business owners and sole traders, thanks in part to its commitment to making the government’s Making Tax Digital regulations easy to navigate. FreeAgent is free while customers retain a business bank account with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank, or make at least one transaction a month through a Mettle bank account. Optional add-ons may be chargeable.
With this integration, bills and books come together faster than ever.
What is the Apron and FreeAgent integration?
Apron’s mission of ‘Captured, paid, reconciled, together’ means creating a shared workflow between where your bills are, and where your books are.
When you connect Apron to FreeAgent, you create a two-way sync between your bills, books, contacts and categories. Create or upload a bill to Apron and it appears in FreeAgent automatically (and vice versa). Any contacts or categories associated with that bill sync at the same time.
Once a bill’s been synced, FreeAgent reconciles it to its matching bank transaction, ticking another task off of your to-do list. It all adds up to creating a single source of truth for your bills and books, whether you manage your own finances, or you’re an accountant or bookkeeper working on behalf of clients.
Even with all of this automation, you retain full control at all times, and can still review and edit anything you need to. And, because Apron creates an audit trail for every transaction, you can track every step in a bill’s journey.
How does the Apron and FreeAgent integration work?
We’ve created a video guide showing you how to connect your Apron and FreeAgent accounts.
You can also find instructions for connecting Apron and FreeAgent in the Apron Help Centre. Read it here: Set up your FreeAgent integration.
Familiar with Apron and looking for quickstart instructions? Follow these steps:
Go to Settings > Company settings > Accounting app. You can also start from Bill Pay by clicking Add bills, then Import from Accounting App.
Click Connect and choose FreeAgent.
Log in to FreeAgent and select your company.
Approve access.
That’s it. You’ll be taken back to Apron, and your data will start syncing.
Bill pay in FreeAgent (coming soon)
Next on the agenda for the Apron and FreeAgent integration is a button that will allow you to pay bills through Apron from inside FreeAgent.
Once the button goes live, you’ll be able to select bills in FreeAgent and pay them one by one, or in batches via bank transfer or your credit card, even if your suppliers don’t accept credit cards.
The option to earn points on payments remains the same whether you pay bills directly through Apron or through the FreeAgent integration. Learn more about Apron Rewards.
For more on connecting Apron to FreeAgent, visit the FreeAgent website.