Bookkeeping

Seapoint Bookkeeping pulls your unreconciled transactions in from your connected bank accounts and presents them in a simple table view.

In this view, you’ll see the date of the transaction, the vendor, Seapoint’s category confidence level, the transaction status, the transaction amount and a column for uploading and viewing evidence attachments.

They’ll be separated into two tabs: ‘To do’ for transactions that still need to be reconciled, and ‘Complete’ for transactions that have been reconciled. Reconciled transactions will appear in this tab, whether they were reconciled directly in Seapoint or reconciled separately in Xero.

For each transaction, you can:

To get started with Seapoint Bookkeeping, you’ll first need to connect your Xero account. This allows Seapoint to pull in your chart of accounts and tax rates, and push the transaction information back into Xero, where it reconciles.

After you’ve connected Xero, you can then use Account Mapping Dialogue to map your bank accounts.

When you first open Bookkeeping, you’ll also be asked to connect your email so Seapoint can scan your inbox for invoices and automatically match them to transactions as evidence. You can disconnect your email at any time from the same Settings page.

After you’ve completed setup, your transactions will appear in Bookkeeping ready for review.

Bookkeeping can be accessed by your Seapoint account admins and invited accountants. This means you can reconcile your transactions yourself, or your accountant can do so without needing to chase you for invoices or receipts.

You can also grant employees a partial view of Bookkeeping, where they can upload evidence and submit transactions and evidence for admin review. After submission, transactions become read-only for the employee.

In Bookkeeping, you’ll see your unreconciled transactions under the ‘To do’ tab in the top-left corner, and all your transactions that have synced to Xero and are ready to be reconciled under the ‘Complete’ tab.

Seapoint automatically breaks down each payment and shows you the date of the transaction, the vendor and the amount. You’ll also see a Seapoint Confidence Level based on vendor history, the reconciliation status and a column where you can attach evidence.

Located in the top-left corner of your Bookkeeping page, these tabs separate the transactions that have been reconciled (or are ready to be reconciled in Xero) from those that haven’t.

The ‘To do’ tab lists unreconciled transactions that either need reviewing or are awaiting approval. When you click into a transaction and approve, the transaction status changes to ‘Synced’ and moves to the ‘Complete’ tab.

To filter transactions, head to the top-left corner of your Bookkeeping page. Here, next to your ‘To do’ and ‘Complete’ tabs, you’ll see a ‘Filter’ tab that lets you filter by:

To filter your transactions, click on the ‘Filter’ tab and hover over the segment you’d like to filter by. Next to the segment, you should see a tick-box list of items that can be filtered within that category.

Select as many items as you like, and your Bookkeeping page will automatically update to show the relevant transactions for you.

You can filter transactions by date using the calendar filter. The button for the filter is located in the top-left corner next to the ‘To do’ and ‘Complete’ tabs, and contains a calendar icon.

By default the button reads ‘All time’, indicating that the current table view shows all transactions that have passed through Seapoint since your account opened. When you click on the button, a monthly calendar view will appear, enabling you to view your transactions over a month, a series of months, or over a quarter.

You can also change your table view to show earliest transactions to latest by clicking on the arrow at the top of the ‘Date’ column. To change the view back to showing the latest transactions, click the arrow again and it’ll revert back.

You can adjust the transaction table layout using the ‘Columns’ button in the top-right corner. When you click the button, you’ll see a dropdown of all the available columns, with the columns currently indicated by a tick.

‘Account’ and ‘Cardholder’ columns are hidden by default, and any tracking dimensions edited in Xero will be reflected here.

To add a column, click on one of the options that doesn’t have a tick next to it and the column will appear in the transaction table. Similarly, to remove a column, untick the option you’d like to remove and it’ll be hidden from view.

If your transaction ‘Needs review’, it means that Seapoint hasn’t been able to assign a category or tax rate to this transaction, so you’ll need to add in missing information before you can approve it.

To do this, click the transaction to open it and review the payment information, document information and category.

You can also add evidence by uploading a PDF, PNG or JPEG file and hit ‘Approve’ to push the information to Xero, where it can be reconciled.

If a transaction is ‘Awaiting approval’, it means that the transaction has a category and tax rate assigned to it, and is in a state where it’s ready for approval. This can be done by you or your accountant in Seapoint or in Xero.

To do this, click on the transaction and read the information about the transaction in the box that opens on the right-hand side of your screen. At this stage, you can edit the transaction information and upload evidence to be reconciled with the transaction.

From there, hit ‘Approve’ in the bottom-right corner to reconcile and move the transaction to the ‘Complete’ tab.

Evidence is a supporting document for a transaction, and includes an invoice or receipt that proves, for VAT purposes, that both the nature of the business and the payment is legitimate.

Some evidence may be pulled and matched directly from your inbox, but other transactions may require a manual upload from a PDF, PNG or JPEG document.

In case of audit, it’s recommended you upload evidence to match each transaction to prove your transactions are what you’ve listed in official paperwork.

For example, if you’re trying to claim £84 in software expenses off your Corporation Tax total but don’t have £84 in receipts, HMRC may prevent you from deducting this amount from your bill.

You might not need to upload evidence for every single transaction, but it’s best to check with your accountant first.

While it’s always a good idea to check with an accountant first, there are some transactions, such as bank fees, interest charges or internal transfers, that don’t always need evidence.

If you’re confident the transaction doesn’t need evidence and you’re happy with the category and tax rate assigned to the category, you can approve.

After you’ve connected your email account, Seapoint scans your inbox for invoices and automatically matches them to transactions based on vendor, reference, amount and date.

When a match is found, the invoice appears as suggested evidence on the transaction – you just need to confirm it’s correct or delete if it’s not.

To attach evidence to a transaction, you can:

You can upload evidence as a PDF, PNG or JPG.

If you have evidence that sits outside your email inbox, you can bulk upload evidence to Seapoint as a PDF, PNG or JPEG document.

To bulk upload evidence, head to ‘Documents’ and upload as many documents as you’d like. Seapoint then automatically matches them to transactions based on vendor, reference, amount and date.

After uploading evidence, Seapoint scans the file and highlights any information that doesn’t match the transaction. Mismatch indicators can appear for vendor, amount, currency, date and reference, each with a tooltip pinpointing the discrepancy.

If the evidence you’ve uploaded is wrong, click on the three dots next to the file and select ‘Unlink from transaction’. This doesn’t delete the evidence altogether, but frees it up to be linked to the right transaction.

If you want to delete the evidence, select ‘Delete invoice’ from the dropdown.

Yes. Simply open the transaction and click the red trash icon next to the attached evidence. Once deleted, you’re then free to upload the correct evidence to the transaction.

Seapoint uses AI to suggest the most likely Xero account code and tax rate for each transaction. These suggestions are based on:

Suggestions from Seapoint appear automatically on each transaction with a confidence indicator on your table view, so you know how reliable the suggestion is.

The ‘Confidence’ column shows how confident Seapoint is with the category it’s assigned a transaction.

In this column, you’ll find each transaction is marked as either high, medium or low.

Xero tracking dimensions, or tracking categories, are custom labels you set up in Xero to tag transactions by department, project, cost centre, or any other dimension your business uses.

In Seapoint Bookkeeping, tracking dimensions appear as options in a dropdown menu beneath the Xero section, below the account code and tax rate fields. You can choose from the options pulled from your Xero tracking categories, with an AI suggestion provided where possible (shown with a sparkle icon).

You can also add tracking dimension columns to the table view via the column customiser. Once enabled, you can select values directly from a dropdown in each row without opening the transaction.

If you haven't set up tracking categories in Xero, you won’t see the Xero tracking category field.

Yes. To change the transaction category, open the transaction, click ‘Category’ and choose the right category from the dropdown list displayed on screen.

If more than one transaction has been assigned the wrong category, you can change the category for a bulk of transactions using the X keyboard shortcut. Simply select all the relevant transactions, press X and choose the correct category.

To change the account code, open the transaction in Bookkeeping, click ‘Account code’ and select the correct Xero account code from your chart of accounts.

Similarly, to change the tax rate, open the transaction, click ‘Tax rate’ and select the correct rate from the dropdown menu.

If you have more than one transaction that’s been assigned the wrong tax rate, you can correct this in bulk using the T keyboard shortcut. Simply select all the relevant transactions, press T and choose the correct tax rate.

Your Xero chart of accounts and tax rates are synced automatically, so you’ll always see the latest options available in your Xero categorisation.

After you’ve checked the transaction, attached any necessary evidence and are confident the right category has been assigned, you’re ready to approve a transaction to Xero.

To approve, hover over the transaction in the table and click the ‘Approve’ button that appears at the end of the row, confirming you’re ready for the transaction to be synced to Xero.

You can also open the transaction and click the blue ‘Approve’ button in the bottom-right corner of the screen, or highlight the transaction and use the A keyboard shortcut.

This changes the transaction status to ‘Sync pending’ and will be pushed to Xero in the next sync cycle.

When syncing to Xero, Seapoint can create new contacts automatically. The transaction sheet shows a contact picker with a ‘New’ badge when the contact doesn't exist in Xero yet.

You can approve multiple transactions at once by using the checkboxes on the left of each transaction row.

Select the checkbox of each transaction you’d like to approve and click the ‘Bulk approve’ button in the toolbar that appears.

You can also pull up the toolbar using Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K) and then select the ‘Approve’ option, or even just use A to approve a batch of transactions that are ready to go.

You can only bulk approve transactions that have all required information, including category and evidence.

Approved transactions are synced to Xero on average every 30 minutes through an automated background process.

You’ll know when a transaction has synced, as its status will change to ‘Synced’ and the transaction will be moved to the ‘Complete tab.’

You don’t need to keep the page open to complete the sync – it’ll happen automatically in the background.

Occasionally, syncs to Xero can fail. When this happens, you’ll see the transaction has a ‘Sync failed’ status on your Bookkeeping dashboard.

Xero sync failures can be caused by:

To find out how to troubleshoot the issue affecting your sync, read our support page ‘What do I do if my sync to Xero fails’.

When a transaction is synced to Xero from Seapoint, it creates a bill and payment in your Xero organisation. The bill includes the vendor, amount, account code, tax rate, tracking dimensions and any attached evidence as a linked document.

Transactions without evidence instead appear in Xero as a ‘Spend Money’ transaction, whereas credit transactions appear as either a ‘Receive Money’ or ‘Sales Invoice’ depending on the transaction.

As a result, the transaction lands in your Xero account in a state where your accountant can reconcile in a single click.

Once synced, the ‘Synced to Xero’ section in the Seapoint transaction sheet becomes a link that opens the bill directly in Xero, so you can quickly verify it on the Xero side.

If your sync to Xero fails, the unsynced transactions will have their status set as ‘Sync failed’.

You can find out why the sync failed by opening the transaction and viewing the error details. From here, you may find your sync failed for one of the following reasons:

Issue: the transaction takes place in a locked period in Xero, preventing users from editing or adding transactions on or before the lock date.

Solution: to resume syncing from Seapoint, you’ll need to adjust your Xero lock date or change the transaction date.

Issue: your Xero connection to Seapoint may have expired.

Solution: go to ‘Settings’ to reconnect your Xero account.

Issue: the selected account code or tax rate may no longer exist in Xero.

Solution: review the transaction and update the account code or tax rate.

If a transaction has been reconciled in Xero but hasn't yet synced to Seapoint, you can open the transaction and click ‘Mark as reconciled’ in the bottom-right corner.

If you have more than one transaction to mark as reconciled, you select all relevant transactions and press R to mark all as reconciled in bulk.

To connect or reconnect your Seapoint account to Xero:

Xero access tokens expire for security purposes and need to be refreshed periodically. If your token expires, you’ll see a notification on the Bookkeeping page telling you your Xero connection needs attention.

To restore connection, go to Settings in the top-right corner of the Bookkeeping page and click Reconnect to reauthorise.

While Seapoint is disconnected from Xero, transactions will stop syncing and will resume when the connection is restored. No data is lost while Xero is disconnected, and any pending transactions will sync once the connection is restored.

You can use bookkeeping without connecting your email inbox.

If you choose not to connect to your email, Seapoint cannot scan your inbox for invoices or receipts, meaning you’ll need to manually upload evidence for each transaction. To find out how, read our support page ‘How do I manually upload evidence?’

To use keyboard shortcuts in Seapoint Bookkeeping, press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K) to open the command palette and press: