Holly's most robust package, the one that handles class-level coding, customer-job attribution, and full AP, is the one that consumes the most of her team's time. And the AP function inside that package is where the math breaks down.

Before MakersHub, Hillside’s AP process was a choice between two bad options. For some clients, Holly's team entered bills manually into QuickBooks: saving the PDF, attaching it, typing in the line items, the date, the GL code, the business unit, the customer. It was time-consuming, prone to error, and impossible to scale. For other clients, they’d have to import a CSV summary of the month's bills at month-end – which was faster, but gave the client no real-time view of their own AP, and shoved a month of work into a single pinpoint of time at the start of the next period.

Holly had tried the obvious tools: the ServiceTitan QuickBooks integration had real strengths in three-way matching, but its exports to QuickBooks Online generated random bill numbers instead of vendor document numbers, didn't carry business unit data, and required every product to be pre-mapped in QuickBooks or it would land in a ServiceTitan PO income account. It’s workable for an internal bookkeeper at a single company, but not for a firm serving many complex clients. Another tool, Ramp, has a bill module that couldn't read HTML email bills (common in the trades) or image-format invoices. It struggled to recognize multiple bills in a single PDF unless someone manually flagged them with email-split brackets. The conditional logic Holly needed for line-level coding wasn't there. By the time Holly's team had worked around all of it, Ramp took longer than entering bills by hand, and produced more errors at month-end.

Instead of limiting herself to a simple price comparison, Holly's evaluation of MakersHub started with whether the product could handle the things that had broken every other tool: HTML email bills, multi-bill PDFs, image-based invoices, vendor credits, line-level coding, conditional logic that survives the chaos of how field technicians fill out a PO.

What surprised her was the absence of roadblocks. Not one feature, but the scope of what MakersHub could do

Every other product I've tried out, you start using it and you hit roadblocks. My experience with with MakersHub has been the complete opposite. I'll be doing something and think, 'do you think you could do this super obscure thing, this really odd use case?' And you guys are like, 'yeah, actually, we can do this.' Whatever I want to do, it can do

Holly Hill

Owner, Hillside Books

Two real workflows show what that flexibility looks like in practice.

The first is a counter-pickup approval rule for an HVAC client whose technicians were supposed to go through the warehouse for any equipment order, and didn't always. Holly built a rule in MakersHub that watches the ship-to field on every incoming bill. When the ship-to reads "counter pickup," the bill is automatically routed to the owner for approval before anything else happens. The owner now gets visibility, in real time, into every time a technician circumvents the warehouse. 

The second is a customer-attribution workflow for a client who puts the customer's name in the PO field at order time. Before MakersHub, Holly was manually opening every bill, identifying the customer, cross-referencing ServiceTitan to see whether the job was complete, and calculating which costs needed to be journaled into a different period. Now MakersHub captures the PO field on every bill and writes it into the QuickBooks memo line. At month-end, Holly pulls one report from QuickBooks, one report from ServiceTitan, drops them into Claude, and asks which jobs need adjusting entries. A workflow that used to take hours is now a single prompt.

Two real workflows show what that flexibility looks like in practice.

The first is a counter-pickup approval rule for an HVAC client whose technicians were supposed to go through the warehouse for any equipment order, and didn't always. Holly built a rule in MakersHub that watches the ship-to field on every incoming bill. When the ship-to reads "counter pickup," the bill is automatically routed to the owner for approval before anything else happens. The owner now gets visibility, in real time, into every time a technician circumvents the warehouse. 

The second is a customer-attribution workflow for a client who puts the customer's name in the PO field at order time. Before MakersHub, Holly was manually opening every bill, identifying the customer, cross-referencing ServiceTitan to see whether the job was complete, and calculating which costs needed to be journaled into a different period. Now MakersHub captures the PO field on every bill and writes it into the QuickBooks memo line. At month-end, Holly pulls one report from QuickBooks, one report from ServiceTitan, drops them into Claude, and asks which jobs need adjusting entries. A workflow that used to take hours is now a single prompt.

When Holly first saw MakersHub's pricing, her reaction was direct: at that price point, she couldn't make money on her clients. She was on flat-rate billing with most of them. Adding a per-client software cost meant either eating it or having a hard conversation with clients who already felt like they paid Hillside Books to handle this.

What changed her mind wasn't a discount.

Holly's team tracks time by task category, like AP, AR, and reconciliations, even on flat-rate engagements. She pulled the AP time for each client, assigned an hourly value to her time and her employees’, modeled the time MakersHub would save, and ran a cost-benefit analysis. For some clients, MakersHub came out as a clear gain. For others, it was net neutral after rolling the cost into the existing flat rate.

The net-neutral clients are where the final decision happened.

Holly's vision for Hillside Books isn't to become a thirty-person firm. It's to remain a small, deliberate, niche practice that grows on its own terms, and one that doesn't get left behind as AI changes what bookkeeping looks like.