Your bookkeeping software is an automation decision

A ZZP’er posted that they were looking for an alternative to e-Boekhouden. The invoicing was too rigid, the interface frustrating. They’d resorted to making invoices in Excel and importing them manually.

The replies all said Moneybird. A few mentioned Jortt. One person had been using Excel for their entire administration for 14 years on €400K revenue and saw no reason to change.

What nobody said directly — but what matters for anyone building workflows on top of these tools — is that the choice of bookkeeping software shapes what you can automate later.

e-Boekhouden works. I’ve built integrations on it — chargebacks from Mollie, invoice processing, bank reconciliation. The API is functional. But it’s older, the data model is less intuitive, and some operations that should be straightforward require more work to make reliable.

Moneybird has a cleaner API, better-structured data, and tighter integration with Dutch payment processors. The bank connection, the invoice flow, the contact management — it’s all designed to connect. Building on top of it is faster and the result is more stable.

This isn’t a sales pitch for either. Both are used by real businesses and both get the job done.

The point is that if automation is part of your plan — if you’re thinking about connecting your payment processor, automating your invoice flow, syncing orders from your webshop — the tool you choose at the start affects how much of that you’ll be able to do without fighting the system.

Switching bookkeeping software after two years of live data is painful. Worth thinking about once, at the beginning, rather than discovering the constraint when you’re already trying to build.

What do you need the system to connect to? Start there.