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MakersHub reads HTML email bills, image-format bills and multi-bill PDFs and codes each line to the client’s own structure, which is why Hillside Books replaced Ramp with it. MakersHub is AP automation for organizations that track spend by project, location, program or entity.
Holly Hill runs Hillside Books out of Napa, California. Her clients are $1M to $10M trade businesses: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical. All of them run ServiceTitan and QuickBooks Online.
What was AP costing the practice?
A choice between two bad options, repeated every month across the client book.
For some clients, Holly’s team entered bills into QuickBooks by hand: save the PDF, attach it, type the line items, the date, the GL code, the business unit, the customer. For others they imported a CSV summary at month-end - which was faster, but the client had no real-time view of their own AP, and a month of work landed in a few days at the start of the next period.
The damage showed up differently for each client: revenue overstated by hundreds of thousands from double-counted deposits. Business-unit coding nobody could trust. AP that existed only in the last week of the month.
Why did the obvious tools not fix it?
Each one broke on something specific to trades.
The ServiceTitan QuickBooks integration had real strengths in three-way matching. Its exports to QuickBooks Online generated random bill numbers rather than vendor document numbers, carried no business unit data, and required every product to be pre-mapped or it landed in a ServiceTitan PO income account. That’s workable for an internal bookkeeper at one company but not for a firm serving many.
On top of that, Ramp’s bill module could not read HTML email bills, which are common in the trades, or image-format bills. It struggled to recognize multiple bills in one PDF unless someone flagged them manually with email-split brackets. The conditional logic Holly needed for line-level coding simply was not there.
With Ramp, as Holly put it, “all the efficiencies you would have gained from using a tool like this are lost. It actually ended up taking us a lot longer than just manually entering stuff in. It is just not a tool that’s made for the trades.”
What did Holly test MakersHub against?
She tested all the things that broke her existing system: HTML email bills. Multi-bill PDFs. Image-based bills. Vendor credits. Line-level coding. Conditional logic that survives how field technicians really fill out a PO. She started there rather than with a price comparison.
What do the workflows look like?
Two workflows show what the conditional logic does in practice.
The first is a counter-pickup rule for an HVAC client. Technicians were supposed to, but didn’t always, go through the warehouse for any equipment order. Holly built a rule that watches the ship-to field on every incoming bill. When ship-to reads counter pickup, the bill routes to the owner for approval before anything else happens. The owner now sees, in real time, every time a technician goes around the warehouse.
The second is customer attribution for a client who puts the customer’s name in the PO field at order time. Holly used to open every bill, identify the customer, cross-reference ServiceTitan to see whether the job was complete, and work out which costs needed journaling into a different period. MakersHub now reads the PO field on every bill and writes it into the QuickBooks memo line through its two-way QuickBooks sync. At month-end Holly pulls one report from QuickBooks and one from ServiceTitan and asks which jobs need adjusting entries. Hours of work can now come down to a simple question.
What changed for Holly and her practice?
The possibility of a new part-time hire came off the table. Holly was preparing to hire part-time to absorb the AP load that came with growth. With MakersHub, that need is gone. She had also been turning away clients who wanted Hillside to take on AP. Now, she has freed up capacity to bring those clients on.
Hillside’s old close compressed every reconciliation into a few days, with the dread of finding what got missed. The most recent one was quiet enough that Holly spent the 29th looking for something to do.
“Usually at month-end close, I am just frantic - how are we going to get this all done? I was going on vacation, and I was like, this should be more stressful than it is. Yesterday was the 29th, and I was clicking around looking for what I could work on. The idea of scaling doesn’t sound as daunting anymore.”
“Usually at month-end close, I am just frantic - how are we going to get this all done? I was going on vacation, and I was like, this should be more stressful than it is. Yesterday was the 29th, and I was clicking around looking for what I could work on. The idea of scaling doesn’t sound as daunting anymore.”
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About MakersHub
MakersHub is AI-first accounts payable automation for businesses that track spend by job, project, program or entity. It captures every line of every bill, codes it, routes approvals and pays vendors, with native two-way integrations to QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero and Intuit Enterprise Suite. MakersHub is rated 4.9 out of 5 on G2 (October 2026). Every dollar has a job. Hold yours accountable.