Comparison · Doing it by hand
The routine you've been running.
If you've been bridging Shopify and FreeAgent by hand, it probably looks something like one of these:
- "I just set it to weekly withdrawals so I can enter all the transactions in two entries."
- "I lump the whole payout as one Sales entry and explain the fees off the bank statement."
- "My accountant deals with it at quarter-end. I dread the email."
- "I built a Zap that sort of works. I check it once a month."
- "I let it pile up and panic at VAT quarter."
We're not making any of these up — they're verbatim from UK Shopify sellers on forums. If one of them is you, the routine is fine. It works. It's just expensive in a way money doesn't measure.
What manual entry costs that isn't money.
Here's the trade-off in concrete numbers, working from a small Shopify store with one payout a week:
- 30 minutes per payout if you're careful and your books are tidy.
- 52 payouts a year = 26 hours.
- One missed refund or one mis-explained fee that surfaces at VAT quarter and costs an evening to track down — call it three of those a year, six hours.
- One quarter-end panic catch-up, conservatively, at four hours.
That's about 40 hours a year of bookkeeping admin you don't enjoy. A real working-week of evenings.
For some sellers that's fine. The hourly cost is low because the alternative is paying. For sellers who'd rather use those hours on the actual business, the maths shifts.
Where manual entry beats us.
We owe you this list before we ask for the call.
- It's free. No subscription, no OAuth grants, no third-party in your books.
- You already know how to do it. Whatever routine you've built works. There's no learning curve.
- You don't have to trust anyone new. A working solo workaround has no surface area for an integration outage.
- You're not locked in. A new accountant can pick up your manual entries and understand them in a session.
- It scales down well. At ten orders a month, the time cost of manual is genuinely small.
If those things matter more than the 40 hours a year, manual entry is the right call. We'd rather you stay on the workaround than buy something you don't need.
Where Bridging Ledger fits.
The honest case for switching:
- The same primitive, every time. Bridging Ledger writes payouts as transfer explanations and fees as separate entries — the exact pattern UK accountants on forums kept arriving at independently. No drift, no variation, no late-night judgement calls.
- No quarter-end catch-up. The payouts are pushed within a day of arriving. VAT quarter is "already done" rather than "to do."
- Reversible. Push a payout, see it in FreeAgent, hate it, un-push in one click. The entries we created come back out. You're never stuck with our choices.
- Built around your mental model, not forced into ours. If you treated Shopify as a virtual bank account already, we just put that into code. If you didn't, the call will walk you through why this approach beats invoicing-per-order.
At a glance.
| Doing it by hand | Bridging Ledger | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per payout | 20–40 minutes | Seconds |
| Quarter-end | Hours to days | Already done |
| Accuracy | Up to you and your patience | Same primitive every time |
| Reversible | Yes — you can delete entries | Yes — un-push in one click |
| What gets pushed | Whatever you copy across | Bank transaction explanations, fees split out |
| Mental model | The one you already use | The same one |
| Cost | Free | Talk to us |
| Founder reachable | n/a | Yes — direct email |
A call costs less than a bad payout.
If you've been running the workaround for a while and you're still here, you probably know it's costing more than it should. Half an hour with me on the calendar is the way to find out whether Bridging Ledger fixes it for you specifically — or whether your routine is, honestly, fine.