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If you manage AP for trade businesses on ServiceTitan and QuickBooks Online where every bill needs to hit the right job, class, and business unit before anything posts, this is for you.
MakersHub works with a lot of operators in the physical economy - construction, HVAC, plumbing, mechanical, and the like. Interestingly, some of the sharpest feedback we get comes from the bookkeepers and accountants who sit inside multiple of these businesses at once and see exactly where every AP tool either falls short or falls apart. Operators know their own pain, but bookkeepers managing AP for ten trade clients know the pain and its pattern.
Here is what I shared on LinkedIn:
Last week I spent an hour interviewing Holly Hill for a customer story. Holly runs a bookkeeping firm in Napa, CA called Hillside Books. She got her bookkeeping certification at nineteen, during the Great Recession, because bookkeeping struck her as a trade that had survived hundreds of years and would survive a while longer. It was a clear-eyed bet from someone who didn't have a four-year college in front of her.
A few years later, in the early days of Hillside Books, Holly told me about doing a "nomad year" with her partner. She described sitting at a computer in Rome chasing hourly billing, feeling guilty she wasn't at the Colosseum, then standing at the Colosseum feeling guilty she wasn't working. So she rebuilt the whole business. Flat-rate billing, deliberately small, no interest in managing a big team, building towards a life she actually wanted to live.
Holly runs Hillside Books the way she ran that decision. She's turned away clients — not for lack of demand, but because she refused to let growth cost her the thing she built the business to protect. People talk about scaling as though it's the only honorable goal (author sheepishly raises hand). Holly's clearer than that, and getting to help a business like hers grow on its own terms is one of the genuine privileges of building MakersHub.
The AP package that consumes the most time is the one that needs to work perfectly
Holly's most comprehensive service offering at Hillside Books is also the one that breaks the fastest when the tools aren't right. For trade businesses on ServiceTitan and QuickBooks Online who have high bill volume and extremely granular coding requirements, the margin for error is low. A mistake at the bill level doesn't stay there. It travels into job costing, into class reporting, into the financials a business owner uses to decide whether to hire another technician or hold off another quarter.
Holly absorbs that risk on behalf of every client she serves. Which means the tool she uses is largely about quality control.
Two bad options, and a third that made things worse
Before finding a tool that worked, Hillside Books was stuck choosing between manual entry and month-end CSV import - neither of which solved the problem. Just moved it.
Manual entry meant saving the PDF, attaching it, typing in the line items, the date, the GL code, the business unit, the customer. It’s accurate when done right, but slow and basically impossible to scale across multiple clients. Month-end CSV import was faster in the moment but compressed a full month of AP into a single point in time, gave clients no real-time view of their own financials, and created a bottleneck that made every month-end harder than it needed to be.
Then came the tools marketed as the solution. The ServiceTitan QuickBooks integration has genuine strengths in three-way matching, but its exports to QuickBooks Online generate random bill numbers instead of vendor document numbers, don't carry business unit data, and require every product to be pre-mapped in QuickBooks or it lands in a ServiceTitan PO income account. And Ramp's bill module couldn't read HTML email bills - which is common in the trades, where vendors send formatted emails rather than PDF attachments. Ramp struggled to recognize multiple bills inside a single PDF unless someone manually flagged them with email-split brackets. The conditional logic needed for line-level coding at class and business unit level wasn't there. Every workaround took longer than the last. By the time Holly's team had navigated all of it, Ramp was slower than entering bills by hand - and producing more errors at month-end, not fewer.
What the trades AP stack actually requires
Most AP tools were designed for businesses with cleaner, more standardised bill formats, fewer line-level coding requirements, and a single entity rather than a network of interconnected jobs, classes, and cost centres. Trade businesses run on ServiceTitan for a reason. The operational data lives there. But ServiceTitan and QuickBooks Online don't talk to each other the way a bookkeeper needs them to, and most AP tools sit in between without solving that gap, adding a step without removing the problem.
What works best for this stack is a tool that handles bills in whatever format they arrive, whether that’s PDF, HTML email, or multi-bill PDFs without manual splitting, and maps them to the right job, class, and business unit without requiring someone to maintain a product mapping table for every client.
What changes when the tool is built for this
For Hillside Books, the change wasn't abstractly faster. It was specific: HTML email bills read without manual reformatting. Multi-bill PDFs processed without someone flagging splits with brackets. Line-level coding to job, class, and business unit applied at intake, not reconstructed at month-end. The workarounds didn't get faster. They stopped being necessary. And the time that was going into workarounds went back to the work that actually requires a bookkeeper's good judgment.
A firm that runs lean by design doesn't have spare headcount to absorb tool failures. Every hour a bad tool costs is an hour that came directly out of the capacity the business was built around.
Read Holly Hill's full story here, and book time with the team if you’re running the same stack.
Charley Howe, Co-Founder and President, MakersHub