Accounting

Moneybird is simple until "simple" means opening it by hand for every single order

Moneybird is deliberately, admirably simple, and that is exactly why so many shops and freelancers pick it. The trouble arrives with growth, not with the software: at ten orders a day, opening Moneybird and typing an invoice is a habit. At fifty, it is most of somebody's afternoon, every afternoon.

And the invoices that get typed late get paid late, because a customer's payment term starts at the invoice date, not at the order date.

  • Documented REST API, straightforward to build on
  • Mollie payment matching included
  • From €1,700 plus service fees
The tool

What Moneybird is, and where its ceiling actually sits

Moneybird is Dutch online accounting software aimed at freelancers, small agencies and small webshops. Sales and purchase invoicing, quotes, bank reconciliation, VAT returns, a documents inbox, time tracking. Deliberately narrow: no warehouse, no production, no multi-entity consolidation, no customer-specific price lists.

That narrowness is a feature until the business outgrows one of the edges. The usual first edge is volume — invoicing stops being a five-minute job. The second is the split between where customers live: contacts in Moneybird, the same contacts in a CRM, and nobody sure which one has the right billing address.

Its API is a documented REST API with straightforward token authentication, one of the more pleasant Dutch accounting APIs to build against. That means a Moneybird connection is usually custom rather than a plugin, and usually cheaper than the equivalent for a heavier package, because there is less system to reason about.

What goes wrong

Three things that go wrong when Moneybird sits next to a shop by hand

Moneybird users tend to be small teams, which changes the failure modes: nothing here is an enterprise data-governance problem, it is all about one or two people carrying something they should not have to.

Invoices go out in batches, so money comes in in batches

When invoicing is a manual task it becomes a Friday task, or a "when I get round to it" task. So an order from Monday is invoiced on Friday, its 14-day term starts on Friday, and the payment lands four days later than it needed to. Multiply that across a month of orders and your cash position is permanently a week behind your sales.

What you see instead

The invoice exists in Moneybird within a minute of the order, sent or in concept depending on what you want. Nobody has a Friday task, and the payment term starts on the day the customer actually bought.

Mollie says paid, Moneybird says open

A lot of Moneybird users take payment through Mollie, which means the money is in before the invoice exists. So Moneybird shows an invoice as outstanding, the automatic reminder goes out, and a customer who paid two weeks ago gets chased. That email costs more goodwill than any of the time saved.

What you see instead

The Mollie payment is matched to the invoice and Moneybird flips to paid the moment the money clears, including the transaction fee as a separate line so your margin is honest. Refunds become credit notes rather than unexplained differences.

The same customer exists three times, slightly differently

Contacts get typed into Moneybird, into the webshop, and into whatever CRM or mailing tool the sales side uses. Names drift, addresses drift, and VAT numbers get entered in one place only. When an invoice needs correcting you find out which copy was wrong at the worst possible time.

What you see instead

One system owns the contact — usually the shop or the CRM — and Moneybird follows it, matched on VAT number or email. A change of address is one edit, in one place, and the next invoice has it.

The bill for doing it by hand

What manual Moneybird invoicing costs, and when it honestly does not

Moneybird invoicing is fast — that is the point of the product — so the per-invoice cost is lower than with a heavier package. Call it a minute and a half to two minutes for a simple order with an existing contact. The cost is in the volume and in the delay, not in the individual act.

At fifty orders a day, two minutes each, that is over an hour and a half a day: around 35 hours a month. That is the point where the arithmetic is not really arguable. But we would rather be straight about the other end of it: if you send twenty invoices a month, this costs you twenty minutes a week, and a €1,700 project will not pay for itself in any timeframe worth planning around.

What does change that calculation at low volume is the delay and the goodwill, not the hours. If late invoicing is squeezing your cash flow, or if payment reminders are going to customers who already paid, the case can be worth making at much lower volumes — and the Growth Scan is a cheaper way to work out which of those you have than a quote is.

  • Fifty orders a day at two minutes: roughly 35 hours a month.
  • Three to five days of average invoicing delay, on every invoice, straight out of your cash position.
  • Payment reminders sent to customers who already paid through Mollie.
  • Duplicate contacts, discovered when an invoice has to be corrected.
What we build

We build the thing on the other end too

Moneybird users are usually the clearest case for this: the shop or the site is often the only system in the company besides the accounting package, so the two of them together are the whole operation. Getting both right is one project, not two suppliers pointing at each other.

A connection needs two ends. Plenty of agencies will build you the API call and hand you a JSON payload; that is the easy half. The harder half is what the data lands in — a website, a webshop, a portal your customers log into, an internal tool that replaces a spreadsheet. JKC builds both ends, which is why the connections we build tend to keep working: nothing about the receiving side is a black box to us.

API integrations

The connection itself: authentication, field mapping, rate limits, retries and a queue that survives the other system being down for an hour. Built against the documented API where there is one, and against whatever the vendor really offers where there is not.

Websites

WordPress sites that read from your systems instead of repeating them by hand: a careers page fed by your HR system, a team page that follows your payroll, prices and availability that are the real ones.

Webshops

WooCommerce shops where the order is the last time anyone types it: it becomes an invoice in your accounting package, a label at your carrier, a stock mutation in your warehouse, and a line in your CRM, on its own.

Web applications

When the process does not fit any standard product: a customer portal, a quoting tool, a planning board, a dashboard that reads three systems at once. Built on your data, with your systems as the source instead of a copy of them.

What can be connected

What can be connected between Moneybird and your shop, CRM or site

Moneybird has no stock and no order objects, so the flows are about invoices, contacts and money. That is a shorter list than for an ERP, and it is one of the reasons a Moneybird project usually lands at the bottom of the price range.

  • Orders as sales invoices

    Contact, invoice lines, quantities, prices, discounts, the right VAT rate per line and your own ledger accounts. Sent immediately or created as a concept for someone to check first — a choice worth making per order type rather than once.

  • Recurring invoices for subscriptions and retainers

    A subscription started on the site becoming a recurring invoice in Moneybird, and cancelling on the site ending it there too. The cancellation half is the one people forget, and the one that shows up as invoices to former customers.

  • Payment status from Mollie, Stripe or your bank

    The invoice marked paid on the day the money arrived, with the payment provider's fee booked as its own line so gross and net are both visible. Refunds become credit notes.

  • Contacts between Moneybird, the shop and a CRM

    Matched on VAT number or email, with one system named as the owner of the billing address. Works with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Teamleader or a shop's own customer table.

  • Time entries from a project or planning tool

    Hours booked in Productive, Monday or a tool of your own arriving in Moneybird as billable lines, so an invoice for a month of work is generated rather than assembled from a spreadsheet.

  • Invoices and open balance into a customer portal

    A logged-in customer downloading their own invoices, seeing what is open and paying it there. Cheap to build on top of a connection that already exists, and it takes a category of email off your desk entirely.

Rows one and three together are the classic Moneybird project, and they are usually enough: invoices created automatically, payments matched automatically. Everything else is worth adding once you can see those two running.

How it works

How a connection gets built at JKC

The same four steps every time, whichever tool it is. Nothing here is a workshop you pay for: step one exists because scoping a connection wrong is the single most expensive thing that can happen to it.

  1. 1. We look at what is actually being retyped

    Not "which fields exist" but "which fields does somebody currently move by hand, how often, and what breaks when they get it wrong". Most projects turn out to need two or three flows, not a full two-way sync of everything. That conversation is what keeps the quote where it is.

  2. 2. We pick the route, and say why

    A maintained connector from the vendor, a platform like Make or Zapier, or a custom integration against the API. Cheapest first, not custom first: if a supported plugin does exactly what you need, that is the answer and we will tell you so. Custom is for the cases where the off-the-shelf option would need so much configuring that it becomes the fragile option.

  3. 3. We build it to survive the other system

    Every connection ships with retries, a queue and an idempotency key, so an order that arrives while the other side is down is delivered later rather than lost, and a retry does not create a second invoice. On a test environment first where the vendor offers one, so the first thing your real administration sees is a working connection.

  4. 4. We hand it over with the failure modes written down

    Which alerts you will get, what each one means, what to do about it, and who to call. Plus the credentials in your own name, in your own vault — not in ours. A connection nobody but us can maintain is a connection you do not own.

More about system integrations at JKC

After it goes live

A connection that fails silently is worse than no connection

This is the part most quotes leave out. A connection that stops working without telling anyone is worse than manual work, because with manual work at least somebody notices when it does not get done. Every connection JKC builds is monitored, and the monitoring is not an upsell — it is in the service fee.

An alert per failed message, not a monthly report

A message that does not get through raises an alert the same hour, with the record it was about. Not a dashboard you have to remember to look at.

Replay, not re-enter

Anything that failed sits in a queue and can be sent again once the cause is fixed, in order. Nobody goes back through yesterday to find the four orders that did not land.

We watch the vendor's changes, so you do not have to

APIs get versioned, deprecated and rate-limited. When a vendor announces a change that affects your connection, adjusting to it is part of the service fee, not a new project.

What it costs

From €1,700, and the biggest variable is who built the other end

For Moneybird specifically, the honest note is about volume rather than technique. Below roughly a hundred invoices a month, a connection is usually not worth €1,700 on time saved alone, and we will say so. Above that, or where late invoicing is costing you cash, it pays for itself inside a year.

A connection starts from €1,700 plus a monthly service fee, which covers the monitoring, the queue and keeping up with the vendor's API changes. Work outside a fixed scope is €95 per hour.

What moves the number is not the tool — it is how well the system on the other end is known. If JKC built your website, your webshop or your web application, we already know its data model, its edge cases and where its stock numbers really come from, and a connection into it is mostly configuration and testing. If it is a system we have never opened, we start with a short technical check of both sides and quote after that, so you are not paying hourly for us to work out the basics.

Two more things that move it, in our experience more than anything else: whether the tool has a real API or only a CSV export, and whether the sync has to go both ways. One-way is roughly half the work of two-way, because two-way means deciding, per field, which system wins when they disagree — and that decision is the expensive part, not the code.

Questions

Frequently asked questions about connecting Moneybird

Yes, and it is the single most asked-for Moneybird connection we get. A Mollie payment is matched to its invoice and Moneybird flips to paid on the day the money actually cleared, not on the day somebody got round to checking the bank.

Two details that make the difference between a working version and a nearly-working one: Mollie's transaction fee is booked as its own line, so your margin per order stays honest instead of quietly shrinking; and a refund becomes a credit note against the original invoice rather than an unexplained negative in the bank feed.

Often next to this one

Tools that often sit next to this one

Almost nobody connects one tool. These are the ones that come up in the same conversation, either because they sit in the same part of the business or because people ask for the two together.

See all integrations

Free, 10 minutes

Not sure where the manual hours actually go?

That is what the Growth Scan is for. Ten minutes, no sales call attached: you get back where the double work sits, which connection would pay for itself first, and which one honestly would not.

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