How the Apron integration works
This article explains how the Apron integration synchronises your bills and contacts in FreeAgent.
Benefits of the Apron integration
Apron brings bill capture, payments and expenses together in a single platform. Business owners earn rewards on daily spending. Finance teams and accountants and bookkeepers unlock more time for high-value work that generates revenue, leaving chasing payments, sorting and admin to Apron’s AI functionality.
Connecting FreeAgent to Apron keeps your bills and contacts in sync automatically across both platforms.
How the Apron integration works
Apron connects directly to your FreeAgent account. Any bill added in FreeAgent appears in Apron, and vice versa, so there’s no double data entry and your data is always consistent.
When you pay a bill in Apron, the bill payment will be reflected in your FreeAgent Apron account automatically for you to approve. Payments made with Apron can take up to two days to appear in your Apron bank account in FreeAgent.
Please note that the Bill Payment will need to be approved in order to mark the bill as paid.
Out-of-pocket expenses created in Apron
If you create an out-of-pocket expense in Apron, the employee requesting reimbursement will be added as a contact in FreeAgent and the expense will be recorded as a bill. Therefore, when the payee is repaid for the expense, you can either add the repayment in Apron or mark the bill as paid in FreeAgent.
This is different to how out-of-pocket expenses are usually dealt with in FreeAgent. Because out-of-pocket expenses come into FreeAgent as bills via Apron, any money owed to an employee for the reimbursement of an expense will show under Trade Creditors on the balance sheet in FreeAgent, rather than under the specific Expense Account for the employee. This is due to Apron’s own structuring and is not something FreeAgent can change. However, you can change how this appears in you bookkeeping by using journal entries to move the value from Trade Creditors on the balance sheet to the Expense Account. You would need to then enter an additional pair of journal entries when the 'bill' was paid, to reverse the journal entries you posted earlier. Please note that posting this first pair of journal entries would mean that the Aged Creditor report in FreeAgent would not match the total shown on the Trade Creditors category in the Trial Balance, until the 'bill' has been marked as paid and until the journal entries are reversed.
Coming soon
In the coming months, you’ll be able to use Apron to pay bills in FreeAgent, including multiple bills with batch payments, with all payments automatically reconciled back to an Apron bank feed. Alternatively, bills captured and paid in Apron will be synced back to FreeAgent.
This phase of the integration will allow users to complete the entire 'capture-to-pay' cycle, switching seamlessly between apps, reducing manual data entry and saving valuable time.