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Introduction

Accounting integrations are crucial for bridging the gap between your AP automation solution and your customers’ accounting software. This guide outlines how to leverage accounting integrations through Integration Labs’ Unified Accounting API, facilitating the development of an end-to-end automated AP product.

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What is the Accounts Payable (AP) Workflow?

  1. Bill Collection: Capture and log bills received from suppliers.
  2. Bill Verification: Validate bill details against purchase orders.
  3. Execute Approval: Route bills for approval based on predefined workflows.
  4. Payment Processing: Execute payment to suppliers upon approval.
  5. Reconciliation: Match bills and bill payments with transactions in accounting systems.

Integration with accounting systems is essential to automate these steps, particularly for reconciliation, ensuring transactions are accurately recorded in your customers accounting software.

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The Role of Accounting Integrations and Integration Labs’ Unified Accounting API

While essential, developing and maintaining multiple accounting integrations in-house is resource-intensive. Integration Labs’ Unified API simplifies this process by providing a single API to connect with over 20 accounting platforms.

The benefits of a Unified API include:

  • Global Connectivity: Simplifies integration with multiple accounting platforms, ensuring maximum coverage for current and future customers.
  • Accelerated Go-to-Market: Integrating with one Unified API significantly reduces the time required to build, test, and launch an integrated product.
  • Cost Savings: Lowers the overall cost of developing and maintaining integrations, allowing resources to focus on core product development.
  • Maintenance Ease: Offloads integration maintenance responsibilities, enabling your team to focus on core product enhancement.

Adopting Integration Labs’ Unified API speeds up the development process and adds significant value to your Accounts Payable (AP) solution, making it more reliable and easier to integrate with customers’ preferred accounting systems.

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How to Build an Automated Accounts Payable (AP) Product with a Unified Accounting API

You can handle all of the common workflows required to offer your customers an Accounts Payable (AP)/ Bill Payment product. Here’s a summary of the steps involved:

  1. (One-Time Activity) Connect a customer’s accounting systems with Integration Labs’ Authentication Flow.
  2. Use the Bills API to create a Bill and link Contacts, Purchase Orders, Items, and Accounts to the respective Bill.
  3. Upload Documents to their respective Expense/Bill.
  4. Create and Link Bill Payments, Purchase Orders, Good Reciept Notes, Bill Credit Notes, Contacts and Open Bills.
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Connect with your customers' accounting platform (One-Time Activity)

Integration Labs provides two convenient options to connect with your customers’ accounting platform:

  1. Use Integration Labs’ Connect Link, a convenient and secure URL, or
  2. Embed Integration Labs’ Connect SDK into your application

The Invite Link requires no code, making it suitable to start without a developer. You can customize and white-label this onboarding process with Integration Labs’ Connect SDK, allowing authentication to occur natively in your product. Either way, your customers will be guided through a simple authorization flow to connect their accounting platforms to your product.

  1. Use our Dashboard or APIs to connect a customer’s accounting platform. Use POST/invite-links, and provide a name for your customers’ company.
  2. A unique company_id will be generated once your customer completes the authentication flow. This company_id will be used to read and write data to their accounting platform.
2

Create a Bill (Recurring)

Use POST/bills to create bills.

Important points to note:

  1. Contacts: This is the vendor linked to the Bill. Use GET/contacts and POST/contacts. A Contact ID is required to post a Bill, so if the contact doesn’t exist on the accounting platform, create a new vendor using POST/contacts.
  2. Expense Account or Debited Account: You can push multiple line items (usually just 1) when pushing an bill. Each line item will have an expense account associated (category = ‘expense’). GET/accounts lets you fetch all accounts, and you can filter the account type by category = ‘expense’.
  3. Purchase Order: Most companies usually issue Purchase Orders before a bill is generated. The Purchase Order ID can be passed in POST/bills to link the purchase order and bill.
  4. Credit Account (Not Required): When you use POST/bills, bills are automatically placed under the Account - category = ‘liability’ and account_type = ‘accounts_payable’.
3

Upload Documents (Recurring)

POST/documents lets you upload a file to an expense, invoice, or bill. When posting a document you will be required to pass the field document_type_id, which represents the platform_id that will be returned after you create a bill.

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Link Bill Payment and Credit Notes

A Bill Payment credits an account that serves as the source of funds for the payment (Credit Card or Bank).

  1. Use POST/bill_payments to create and link bill payments.

The bill credit note can be created and immediately applied to a bill, or it can be created and left unapplied.

  1. Use POST/bill_credit_notes to create a Bill Credit note, which can be linked to a Vendor.

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Learn how to build an Automated Accounts Payable (AP) product

The steps above explain how to manage the most common actions of an automated Accounts Payable (AP) product with Integration Labs’ accounting integrations. If you have more questions or would like to build an automated Accounts Payable (AP) product with Integration Labs’ Unified APIs, we’d love to help you get started. Speak to our integration experts today!

PayrollAccounts Receivable (AR)