“Automating saves you hours a week” is easy to say. How much it saves you depends on your own sales and on how you work today. Rather than promise a number that will not fit your situation anyway, you are better off doing the sum yourself. For creating invoices from Shopify in Moneybird, that is surprisingly simple.
Work it out
Take one order and count what you do to it by hand today:
- Copy over the customer details or create a new contact.
- Retype the line items, discounts and shipping.
- Pick the right VAT rate per line.
- Register the payment on the right account.
- On a return or cancellation, create a credit note.
Allow a few minutes per order, and more when you have to look something up or hesitate over the VAT. Multiply that by your number of orders per month. At ten orders it is manageable. At a hundred or more you are quickly talking about half a day a month spent retyping, plus the time you lose fixing the errors that inevitably creep in.
That last part is what people forget to count. A wrong amount or a missed credit note costs not just the correction itself, but the hunting to work out why your month does not add up.
What runs automatically
The connector between Shopify and Moneybird creates a sales invoice automatically on every paid order. The same steps you now do by hand happen by themselves:
- Line items, discounts and shipping land separately on the invoice, each at the right VAT rate per line.
- Existing contacts are found by email. Only when there is genuinely no match is a new contact created, so your customer base does not fill up with duplicates.
- The invoice is registered as paid on the right account straight away, so your books reconcile.
- A Shopify refund becomes a Moneybird credit note, for exactly the refunded amount.
Standard, reduced, reverse-charge and 0% are applied per line, and for EU sales you can use the OSS setting. If you work B2B, you can apply different invoice rules based on Shopify tags or sales channel, including reverse charge.
What you do not give up
Automating does not mean handing over control. By default Schakel creates the invoice without sending it, so your customer gets nothing unless you turn that on yourself. Every invoice shows up in the log, so you can always check what happened. And because it works per order rather than in one big batch at the end of the month, your bookkeeping keeps step with your sales instead of trailing weeks behind.
The time you get back
The gain is not only in the minutes per order. It is mostly in what you no longer have to do: no longer setting aside a fixed evening a month for the admin, no longer tracing where a difference came from, and no longer feeling you have forgotten something just before filing. That is harder to put into a number, but it is usually the real reason people switch.
Work out what it is worth to you
The honest conclusion is this: how much you save, you know better than we do, because it depends on your order count and how you work today. To see exactly what travels between Shopify and Moneybird and experience it yourself, look at the Shopify to Moneybird connector. You start with thirty days, unlimited, no card, so you can see the difference on your own orders before you pick anything.
Want this handled automatically? Pick your connector.
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