How do accounting firms run AP for many clients from one platform?

Accounting and bookkeeping firms run AP for many clients in MakersHub from one partner account: each client is added as a managed entity with its own bill inbox, its own QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct or NetSuite connection.

Its own users and its own bank accounts, and firm staff switch between clients from a dropdown under one login. The client's owner approves bills and authorizes payments from an email link without a login to the accounting system or to MakersHub's accounting screens.

A managed entity is one client's company in MakersHub: inbox, rules, approvals, ledger connection and payment accounts, segregated from every other client but visible to the firm staff who are assigned to it. Roughly half of MakersHub's customers run through an accounting firm.

When this applies

You offer bill pay or full AP as a service and your clients range from two bills a month to two thousand. Today each client means another login, another inbox, another approval chain run by email, and a tool whose per-client price does not fit the small ones. The client's owner is in court, on a plane or on a job site, and the firm's margin on AP is the same margin problem the client had when it was in-house.

The owner of a multi-industry bookkeeping firm: "I want something that I can log in and see all my clients and then jump from one to another and have the approval easy on the client's end as well." A CPA firm partner on why a dozen bill-pay clients were not all on the same tool:

"We have a whole bunch of clients that have like two bills a month, or three bills a month. There's no reason to pay $100 a month for them."

How firm AP works in the accounting systems alone

QuickBooks Online Accountant gives a firm one login to open each client's company file in turn, and QuickBooks Desktop firms open each company file from a hosted server. The AP work still happens inside each file: the bill is entered there, the approval happens outside it by email, and payment is initiated in that file's bill-pay feature or a separate payment tool with its own per-client subscription. Nothing reads the incoming PDF, nothing routes it to the owner, and the paid status has to be checked file by file.

Xero, Sage Intacct and NetSuite firms face the same structure with different names. The firm's cost is the switching: between files, between tools and between the inbox and the ledger, multiplied by the number of clients.

How MakersHub runs AP across a firm's clients

1. The firm gets a partner account and adds each client as a managed entity. In the Partner Portal, Add and Manage Entity takes the client's legal name, address, billing contact and plan, and links the new entity under the firm. A dropdown beside the firm name switches between clients; the entity you are working in is always shown. The firm account itself carries no charge once a managed client is active.
2. Each client gets its own inbox. Every entity has a dedicated MakersHub address, named for the client on request. Vendors send bills there directly, or the client's existing AP mailbox auto-forwards, and MakersHub picks the bills out of the email stream. Duplicates are flagged on vendor and invoice number. A client with several company files can run them under one shared inbox; that configuration is covered on the multi-location practice page linked below.
3. Each client's ledger connects in minutes. QuickBooks Online connects by OAuth from the entity's Integrations page and syncs the chart of accounts, customers and jobs, vendors, items and Classes in about twenty seconds. QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise files on the firm's server connect through the QuickBooks Web Connector, one per company file. Xero, Sage Intacct and NetSuite connect natively. Property management ledgers connect through a purpose-built export and import.
4. Bills are read and coded per client. MakersHub's extraction model, WiseVision, captures every line. Integration Mapping rules per entity assign GL account, Class, Customer:Job, item and billable status from the vendor, the description or a field on the bill; a rule can be drafted by AI from one bill you have coded, and a rule set built for one client can be copied to the next. New vendors are created in the client's ledger from the bill.
5. The client approves without a login. Approval rules route by amount, vendor, Class, Customer:Job or PO number to the client's owner, manager or board member, who approves from the email link on a phone. The approver sees the bill image and coding and nothing else. The owner of a bookkeeping firm describing the target: "Add the approver as the owner and have the owner just click a link, go in and go, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no."
6. Firm staff and client users see only what they are assigned. Users are added per entity with checkbox permissions for bills, receipts, payables, payments, archives, vendors, integrations, accounting access and admin, plus a bill-approval limit and a payment limit per user. A junior bookkeeper or an offshore team member can be given six clients and no payment access; a partner sees every entity.
7. Payment runs from the client's own bank account. Each entity adds its pay-from accounts under Payment Settings with the client's EIN and a verification document; verification takes minutes. Bills are paid by ACH, check with positive pay, or e-check, one debit per payment from the client's account, and the payment record posts to the client's ledger. Payment authorization is its own workflow: the firm tees up the run and the client's authorized signer releases it, or the firm releases it under a limit the client set.
8. A new client is live in a week or two. Add the entity, connect the ledger, name the inbox, add users, add bank accounts, set the approval and authorization rules, turn on forwarding. Two or three one-hour sessions with MakersHub's implementation team cover it.

Accounting-system specifics

Firm billing. Pricing is per managed entity and usage-based on bills and payments, not per user. The firm chooses, per client, whether the firm is the subscription payor and bills it through or the client pays directly, and can change plan month to month from the Partner Portal. Volume terms scale with the number of managed clients, and a pay-as-you-go option covers clients with a handful of bills a month.

Proof

An HOA accounting firm with 70 to 80 bookkeeping clients and its own owner portal is rolling MakersHub across its associations, starting with a 384-unit association and a 1,700-home client, with board members authorizing payments electronically from several countries. Its owner, before the first association was even live:

"I've been already selling your platform to four associations. My team wants to kill me. You haven't even tried it yet." On why: "I felt many times we fell short from service because we didn't have the technology."

A real estate accounting firm serving family offices, syndicators and property managers runs about 2,000 bills and payments a month for three clients on a property management ledger, 25 to 50 bills a day, through a purpose-built export and import. Its principal on the operating model: firm staff code and queue,

"and every Friday I go in and I release the payments myself,"

said of a client owner who wanted to keep that control.

A bookkeeping firm serving roofing, HVAC and landscaping contractors, ten clients, two of them on a per-client bill-pay tool, moved after one demo. Its owner on rule building by AI:

"That would take me 15 minutes to build out. That took seconds." And: "I absolutely love this. I have at least three clients that I think could definitely benefit from this."

A dental bookkeeping firm bringing on two partners with sixteen offices, about 700 refund checks a month across them, each office moving into its own QuickBooks file under the firm's account. A CPA firm serving about 180 municipal utility districts, each with one to four QuickBooks Enterprise files and its own bank accounts, most paying fewer than ten invoices a month, is replacing paper checks with electronic authorization.

What it doesn't do

MakersHub is not white-labeled; clients see MakersHub, and a shared-branding experience or an API into the firm's own portal is available for larger partners. Each client keeps its own inbox, ledger connection and bank accounts, so a firm's clients never share data; what does carry across is the firm's work, since coding rules, approval groups and templates built for one client can be copied to another. And MakersHub never holds client funds; every payment debits the client's own account.

Frequently asked questions