Make William AI uniquely yours

Back in March, we launched William AI in beta. William is your AI bookkeeping agent built into Apron. William is there to handle those never-ending tasks that slow you down.

William goes beyond capture, and extracts and categorises documents, then publishes them to Xero and QuickBooks autonomously.

You can train William the way you would train a new team member, with set rules for things you don’t want to deviate from, and more flexible guidance on other areas. It learns from your feedback and instructions, becoming schooled in your unique policies and workflow.

In other words, the more you use it, the more it becomes something only your firm could have built. William also addresses the issue of chasing for missing documents, using its ability to connect with client inboxes and proactively track down receipts and invoices.

Before we get into anything else, let’s take a step back and look at exactly what William AI does when you switch it on.

What happens when you use William AI

• We’re making William available to Silver, Gold, and Platinum-tier partners.

• William’s goal is to extract the document, categorise it, then publish it to Xero or QuickBooks. 

• Every decision William makes is backed up by reasoning, shown to you in plain language. 

• If William isn’t confident about publishing, it flags for review. 

• You can teach William, too. Set rules and guidance according to your preferences and your firm’s specific policies regarding categories, suppliers, and VAT rates. Over time, these tasks get closer to running themselves.

• You can also connect William to client inboxes using either Gmail or Outlook, to search for relevant documents, eliminating chasing at its source.

With the addition of William AI, we’re continuing to close the gap between the moment money is spent, to the moment it’s reconciled across your entire workflow.

Why we built William AI

Over the years, we’ve spoken with thousands of accountants, bookkeepers and business owners. Collectively, you’ve told us the same things:

You don’t want more tech, apps or software. You want fewer tools that do more. You want tools that understand how your specific business and firm works; not generic bots.

You’re open to the idea of AI in bookkeeping and payments, but you want to be able to see what it’s doing, and to control it. 

We heard you, and we built William on this basis. Here’s what we did.

From Capture to William AI

• It started with Capture, our flagship invoice capture feature that allows you to upload receipts, invoices and more on the go or at your desk. 

• Capture saves you hours of manual data entry and extraction, by automatically extracting document details and preparing transactions for review. 

• Most OCR providers stop here. We wanted to go several steps further, giving you an AI bookkeeping agent that would act like an employee.

That’s William AI. Connect William to a client’s email inbox, and have it look for missing receipts and invoices. From there, William extracts the details from the document, categorises that document, then publishes to Xero or QuickBooks. 

‘Auto-publish’ allows William to publish autonomously when it makes the decision that it’s confident about its accuracy. But, whether you have Auto-publish turned on or not, William always shows its reasoning, and if it’s ever unsure, it flags a document for review. 

The beta version of William AI exceeded expectations. Now, your ability to see and control what William is doing, and teach it about your specific policies and preferences goes even further.

What’s new with William AI

Today, we’re making William available to Silver-tier partners and above. If you’re new to Apron and want to know how our partner tiers work, check out the Books Club on our website. 

You’ll find William in the Apron sidebar between ‘Home’ and ‘Inbox’. From here, you can navigate through all of William’s functionalities, including:

Teach William — When you give William guidance about your firm and policies, you can do it using normal, plain language. You don’t need to learn code or enter any special terminology. But William doesn’t start from scratch; it comes with UK VAT rules built in from HMRC, so it’s up to date with the standard right away.

Rules and guidance — From guidance on specific suppliers, to set rules on VAT rates, tell William what you want, and William remembers, just like a great team member.

Email search — Connect through both Gmail and Outlook to control which inboxes William has access to.

Activity log — This is where you can see what William is doing with each document. Each document then has its own, more detailed, log.

Built because you’re busier than ever

Every transaction you or a client makes generates dozens of manual tasks. Those tasks are essential to keep firms and businesses running, but they eat into time that could be spent on business development, collaboration, and revenue generation.

William is here to take those tasks off your hands, without you ever having to lose the control you want, need, and deserve. Apron exists for the new generation of business owners and practices. AI has a part to play, not in replacing, but in empowering. 

The power to do more with less is now in your hands. Want to learn more? Join us for a special William AI webinar on 27th May. Register here.