Invoice Automation Built for Multi-Client Bookkeeping
The economics of a bookkeeping practice are brutal on data entry. You quote a fixed monthly fee, then absorb whatever volume the client sends. A client who forwards forty bills one month and a hundred and forty the next costs you the same fee and three times the hours.
ZapBooks removes the keying step from that equation. It connects to each client's bills mailbox, identifies the invoices, extracts vendor, date, amount, tax and line items, and posts a coded bill into that client's QuickBooks Online or Xero file for your review.
You still review. You still make the judgement calls on coding. What disappears is the twenty minutes per client per day of typing numbers that were already sitting in a PDF.
What makes AP hard in accounting and bookkeeping practices
The volume is one problem. The shape of the documents is usually the bigger one.
Clients forward invoices inconsistently
Some forward everything, some forward nothing, and some drop a folder of PDFs in a shared drive at month end. Chasing documents is unbilled work that scales with client count.
Fixed fees, variable volume
Data entry hours track invoice volume, but your fee does not. Every busy client month erodes the margin on that engagement.
Coding knowledge lives in your head
You know that this vendor always goes to subcontractor costs and that one always splits between two jobs. A junior does not, and re-teaching it every hire is expensive.
Month-end compression
Everything arrives at once. The work is not hard, it is just impossible to do all of it in the last four days of the month.
How it works
- 1
Connect each client's bills mailbox
Read-only OAuth connection to Gmail or Outlook. No credentials stored, and no dependency on the client remembering to forward anything.
- 2
ZapBooks identifies invoices automatically
It distinguishes bills from statements, receipts, marketing email and payment confirmations, and pulls attachments as well as invoices embedded in the email body.
- 3
AI extracts the full document
Vendor, invoice number, issue and due dates, subtotal, tax, total and line items with descriptions, quantities and amounts.
- 4
Coding applies your rules
Vendor-to-account mappings persist per client, so the second invoice from a vendor codes the way you corrected the first.
- 5
You review, then it posts
Approved bills sync to that client's QuickBooks Online or Xero file with the source PDF attached to the transaction.
Documents it handles
- Supplier invoices and bills
- Subcontractor invoices
- Utility and telecom bills
- Software and subscription receipts
- Freight and courier invoices
- Credit notes and adjustments
What lands in your ledger
- Vendor names are matched against the existing supplier list in QuickBooks or Xero so you do not end up with three spellings of the same vendor.
- Line items post against your client's chart of accounts, not a generic default, so bills arrive review-ready rather than fix-ready.
- Duplicate detection catches the same invoice arriving twice, which is the single most common source of overstated expenses in a small ledger.
- The source document attaches to the transaction, which keeps the audit trail intact for year-end.
Questions from accounting and bookkeeping practices
Ready to stop typing invoices?
Connect your inbox and your accounting software. ZapBooks reads the invoices, extracts the data and posts coded bills to QuickBooks, Xero or Excel.
14-day free trial. No credit card required.