The Advanced bookkeeping section in your Apron account gives you full control over how documents are handled —from publishing preferences to VAT and line item settings.
To access it, go to Settings > Company settings > Advanced bookkeeping.
You'll find 3 main tabs:
General
Purchases defaults
Sales defaults
Here's what each tab lets you do.
General
This section helps you manage document behaviour across your account.
Enable sales – Toggling on the option 'Enable sales' allows you to upload, process and publish sales invoices as well as set sales defaults and customer rules.
Publishing preferences – Only visible for Practice members. If you're part of a Practice with connected clients, you can restrict document publishing to just the Practice team. Once enabled, only Practice members will be able to publish documents to Xero or QuickBooks. To enable or disable it, you need to choose the client from their Practice hub and then go to the Settings > General section for the specific client.
VAT preferences – If your business isn't registered for VAT, you can turn on the 'Not registered for VAT' option. Apron will then ignore any VAT shown on documents and automatically apply the 'No VAT' rate.
Line items – Enable the 'Capture line items' option to automatically extract line items from all supplier documents, when available. If not enabled, you can still create line items yourself on the document review screen by clicking on Create line items. You'll be able to choose if you want to capture the line items or add them manually. You can update the data on the line items and remove the created line items by clicking on the bin icon next to them.
Additional fields – Only visible if your company is connected to Xero or QuickBooks. This allows you to assign bills to you or projects directly within your accounting software. Check out more in our article: Assigning bills to customers and projects.
Unreconciled transactions – Only available for QuickBooks-connected companies. You can choose the source of your unreconciled transactions – either through direct sync or a manual upload.
Purchases defaults
This section lets you set default preferences for all purchase documents.
Default due date – Choose a default due date for all purchase documents. If left blank, we'll use the due date from the document itself.
Default Xero preferences – Set up how documents publish to Xero:
Publish as – Bill or Spend money
Status – Draft, Awaiting approval, or Awaiting payment
Default VAT rate for documents with no tax – Choose between options like No VAT, Exempt Income, or Reverse Charge Expense (only available if 'Not registered for VAT' wasn't selected under General settings)
Default QuickBooks preferences – Set up how documents publish to QuickBooks:
Publish as – Bill or Expense
Default VAT rate for documents with no tax – Choose your preferred rate (only available if 'Not registered for VAT' wasn't selected under General settings)
Sales defaults
This section lets you set default preferences for all sales documents.
Default due date – Choose a default due date for all sales invoices. If this isn't set, Apron will use the due date on the document.
Set a default due date for sales invoices (by default, this is 30 days from the issue date). Apron will always use the due date from the document if one is found. If no due date is extracted from the document, Apron will apply this default setting instead. You can change this default or turn it off entirely.
Default Xero preferences – Set up how sales documents publish to Xero:
Publish as – Sales invoice
Status – Draft, Awaiting approval, or Awaiting payment
Default VAT rate for documents with no tax – Choose between options like No VAT, Exempt Income, or Reverse Charge Expense
Note: QuickBooks doesn't have default sales preferences available.
Note: Changing any of the preferences above won't affect documents that were uploaded before the change. The new settings will only apply to documents uploaded afterwards.
If you can't update your default QuickBooks or Xero preferences because you're not VAT registered, you'll first need to choose the 'Not registered for VAT' option under the General section.
If you can't see some of the document editing options (like changing the tax rate or marking the document as paid), you might be viewing the document from the Bills section. In that case, open the same document from the Inbox section instead.