How it works
The way you'd do it by hand. Done for you.
If you've reconciled Shopify in FreeAgent manually for any length of time, you'll have settled on a routine that looks something like this:
- Open Shopify, find the payout for the week.
- In FreeAgent, treat Shopify Payments as a separate bank account.
- When the payout arrives in your real bank account, mark it as a transfer from the Shopify bank account.
- Explain the fees separately so the books balance.
- Repeat at the next payout.
That's the right approach. UK accountants and FreeAgent users have been independently arriving at it on forums for years. We built Bridging Ledger to do exactly this, automatically. Same primitive, same data shape — just without the Sunday evening.
What happens when you connect.
Two OAuth connections, both standard:
Shopify. We ask for read access to your orders, transactions, and (if your store qualifies) your Shopify Payments payouts. We don't ask for anything we don't need — no customer marketing scopes, no inventory write, no product management.
FreeAgent. We ask for write access to your bank transaction explanations. We don't touch invoices, contacts, payroll, or expense submissions.
You can revoke either OAuth connection from inside Shopify or FreeAgent at any time. We see the disconnect immediately.
The Shopify and FreeAgent OAuth connection screens, side by side, with the requested scopes visible.
Exactly what we write into your books.
For each Shopify Payments payout, we create a transfer explanation between the Shopify bank account and your main bank account, dated the day the payout arrived.
For each Shopify order:
- A bank transaction explanation for the order value, in the Sales category.
- A separate bank transaction explanation for any Shopify fees on the order, as a Bank/Finance Charge.
- Standard UK orders are pushed the same way every time. Anything more complicated — overseas customers, multi-rate inventory, special schemes — we'll cover in the call before we sync, so you can confirm the result is what your accountant expects.
For PayPal-gateway orders, we route the explanation to a separately-named PayPal bank account in your FreeAgent, if you have one set up. If you don't, we leave PayPal orders for you to handle in the call.
Gift-card orders aren't pushed — they aren't money in your bank.
A FreeAgent bank account view showing a Bridging Ledger-created payout transfer, with the per-order explanations underneath. Real data.
What we don't touch.
A short list because trust hinges on it.
- Invoices. Untouched.
- Contacts. We don't create FreeAgent contacts from your Shopify customers.
- Payroll, expenses, projects, tasks, timeslips. Untouched.
- Bank accounts. We use the ones you've already set up. We don't create or delete any.
- Tax returns. Yours. We push transactions into your bank accounts; what you do with your return is between you and HMRC (or your accountant).
If Bridging Ledger broke worst-case-tomorrow, the only thing in your FreeAgent it could touch is bank transaction explanations on the bank accounts you connected.
Every push is reversible.
Every entry we push to FreeAgent remembers its FreeAgent URL. To undo:
- Undo a single order or payout from its row in the dashboard.
- Undo a whole payout — and the orders inside it cascade out automatically.
- Disconnect your account entirely — we leave the choice of whether to keep the historic entries or remove them.
We don't ship a product where leaving costs you anything. If we did, you wouldn't trust us with your books, and you'd be right.
The un-push button on a payout row, with a confirmation tooltip showing "deletes 22 FreeAgent explanations."
What happens to the books you've already kept.
When you connect, we look 90 days back by default. You can pull in up to a year if you want. Anything you've already explained in FreeAgent by hand stays where it is — we don't try to detect or replace existing entries.
If there's overlap between what you've done manually and what we'd push for the same period, we'll show you the duplicates in the dashboard before pushing anything. You decide what stays.
This is the part of onboarding that usually takes a call. Book one.
A note for multi-channel sellers.
A lot of UK indie sellers run a Shopify store and also list on Etsy, eBay, TikTok Shop, or sell at market stalls. If that's you, Bridging Ledger only covers the Shopify portion. The rest of your sales need another route into FreeAgent — manual, a separate tool, or your accountant.
We're not pretending to be a multi-channel accounting tool. If most of your revenue isn't Shopify, we're probably not your first pick.
If your primary channel is Amazon UK, FreeAgent's own Amazon integration is the right answer — £6/month, first-party.
Half an hour, your numbers, no demo theatre.
The next step is a 30-minute call. Bring up your Shopify and your FreeAgent. We'll look at one payout together, talk about what your current routine is, and see if Bridging Ledger fits. If it doesn't, I'll say so.