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Introduction

Accounting integrations play a pivotal role in bridging your automated Accounts Receivable (AR) solution with your customers’ accounting systems. This document is a step-by-step guide that details the process of using accounting integrations (via Integration Labs’ Unified Accounting API) to develop an automated Accounts Receivable (AR) product with reconciliation.

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What is the Accounts Receivable (AR) Workflow?

The AR workflow involves the following key steps:

  1. Invoice Generation: Automatically create and send invoices based on services rendered or products sold.
  2. Payment Tracking: Monitor incoming payments and match them against outstanding invoices.
  3. Reminders and Collections: Send automated reminders for overdue invoices and manage collections for delinquent accounts.
  4. Reconciliation: Ensure payments are accurately reflected in the accounting system.

Integrating with accounting systems is vital for automating these processes, ensuring that both invoices and payments are processed and reconciled accurately.

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

Building and maintaining integrations with various accounting platforms in-house can be a daunting task - the time and expert resources required come at a high cost.

Integration Labs’ Unified API provides a more efficient solution by offering:

  • Broad Connectivity: Access to multiple accounting platforms, ensuring comprehensive coverage for all current and future customers.
  • Accelerated Go-to-Market: Integrating once with a Unified API significantly reduces the time and effort needed to test, launch, and scale an integrated solution.
  • Cost Reduction: Using Integration Labs eliminates the expenses associated with developing custom integrations.
  • Ease of Maintenance: Offloads integration maintenance responsibilities to Integration Labs, allowing your team to focus on core product enhancement.

Leveraging Integration Labs’ Unified API accelerates the development of your AR automation solution and enhances its reliability and value to customers, ensuring seamless integration with their preferred accounting platforms.

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How to Build an Automated Accounts Receivable (AR) Solution with a Unified Accounting API

This step-by-step guide can help expense management companies use Integration Labs’ Unified Accounting API to automate their customers’ invoices, invoice payments, invoice credit notes, and sales orders reconciliation with their respective accounting systems.

Handle all of the common workflows required to offer an Accounts Receivable/ Invoice Payment product to your customers. Here is a quick summary of all the steps involved:

  1. Use Integration Labs’ Auth Flow to connect a business customer’s accounting system.
  2. Use the Invoice API to create an Invoice and link Customers, Sales Orders, Items, and Accounts to the respective Invoice.
  3. Upload Documents to their respective Invoice.
  4. Create and Link Invoice Payments and Invoice Credit Notes to Customers and Open Invoices.
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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 get started 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 respective 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 Invoices (Recurring)

POST/invoice to create an invoice.

Important points to note while trying to post an Invoice:

  1. Contacts: This is the customer linked to the Invoice. Use GET/contacts or POST/contacts. A contact_id is required to post an Invoice, so if the customer doesn’t exist on the accounting platform, you’ll first have to create a new customer using the POST/contacts.
  2. Items: Every invoice contains multiple items (either goods or services) that were sold as part of the invoice, each of which credits certain accounts depending on what comprises their cost of goods sold. GET/items lets you fetch all items in the business entity’s catalogue.
  3. Sales/Purchase Order: Some companies issue Sales or Purchase Orders before an Invoice is generated. Use GET/sales_orders to get the Sales Order ID, which can be passed in POST/invoices to link the purchase order and bill.
  4. Credit Account (Not Required): When you use the POST/invoices, invoices are automatically placed under account category = ‘asset’ and account type = ‘accounts_receivable’.
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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 feild document_type_id, which represents the platform_id that will be returned after you create a Invoice.

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(Recurring): Link Invoice Payment and Credit Notes

An Invoice Payment debits an accounts receivable account and credits an asset account.

  1. Use POST/invoice_payments to create and link Invoice payments.

The Invoice Credit Note can be created and immediately applied to a bill, or it can be created and left unapplied.

  1. An Invoice Credit Note can be created using the POST/invoice_credit_notes and is linked to a Customer.

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Learn how to build an Automated Accounts Receivable (AR) product

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

Accounts Payable (AP)Point-Of-Sale (POS)