Integrations & Automations

Companies House is UK only, and centrally keyed

Accupe runs Companies House on a single server-side API key that Accupe manages, so there is nothing for your firm to connect or authorise: the card on the Integrations page is informational, carries a green “API Key Active” badge, and has no Connect or Disconnect button on it. UAE firms do not see the card at all. They see a Federal Tax Authority card marked Coming Soon, which is not built yet.

You search Companies House from two places: the Add from CH button on the Client List, shown to admins and managers on UK firms, and the onboarding wizard’s First Client step. Adding a company as a client assigns a CLI reference, sets the source to Companies House, marks compliance status amber, and, where deadline data came back, automatically creates two tasks so nothing slips: an Accounts task at High priority on the Accounts Next Due date, and a Confirmation Statement task at Medium priority on its own due date. Afterwards, a Sync button on the client refreshes business name, address, postcode, deadlines and SIC codes, and Sync All CH on the Client List does the same across every Companies House client at once.

Accupe also checks your Companies House clients daily and logs what changed: a new or resigned director, an address change, a SIC code change. Unread changes appear in a Companies House activity panel on your dashboard home and on the client’s own Details tab, and anything touching a director or a Person with Significant Control automatically raises a Refresh CDD task, so ongoing monitoring is not left to somebody remembering. Those same officers feed the director dropdown on the client’s KYC tab.

Xero and Zoho Books behave identically

Both are available in either region, both require firm admin access to view the page and start a connection, and both refresh their access tokens automatically once connected, so you should not need to re-authenticate. Zoho works across every one of its data centres (.com, .eu, .in, .sa and .com.au) and detects yours automatically. Each card shows the last sync date or “never”, how many contacts have been imported, how many invoices have been pushed, and an inline “Last sync error” banner carrying the underlying message if a run failed.

Neither has a background schedule. Syncing is on demand, through four buttons: Pull contacts, Push invoices, Pull invoices and Sync both. Contact matching runs in a fixed order, an exact case-insensitive email match, then an exact business name match, then a looser partial name match, and matches found only by that last method are flagged in your compliance audit log for manual review, because a partial name match can occasionally link the wrong client. Pushing sends only jobs whose status is exactly Complete with a fee greater than zero, and only where the client is already linked to a contact through a prior pull. Invoices always arrive as drafts, never sent or approved automatically, so you keep control before anything reaches a client.

API keys, and the two automation surfaces

API keys let a script or an external tool read and write your firm’s data through the REST API without sharing a login. Creating one is admin-only, on a Settings page that is not currently linked from the Settings menu or the sidebar, so it is worth bookmarking once you find it. Scopes run from read:all down to individual resources, plus write:tasks and write:all, and the default selection of “Read everything” should usually be narrowed to the smallest set your use case needs. The per-key rate limit is anything from 1 to 600 requests per minute, defaulting to 60. The plaintext key, prefixed acc_live_, is shown exactly once, because Accupe stores only a hash: a key you fail to copy has to be revoked and replaced.

Automations come in two flavours that confusingly share the on-screen name “Automations (Flow)”. The rules engine, linked from Settings under Configuration, is the actively developed one: you pick a trigger (job status changes, deadline approaching, KYC document expired, client added, document uploaded), pick an action (send email, create task, send Slack message, create workflow job, notify team), optionally narrow it with a JSON trigger filter, and get run history, a fire count and an error banner per rule. The older preset page, reachable only from the command palette’s “Run automations now” action or a direct URL, offers four fixed presets with on/off toggles and a Run now button, and its trigger conditions cannot be edited at all.

What people come here to do

• Pull UK company data and monitor changes. Searching, adding a company as a client, the two tasks it creates, syncing, and the daily activity feed.
• Connect Xero. The consent flow, the four sync actions, how contacts are matched, and which jobs are eligible to push.
• Connect Zoho Books. The same four actions and the same matching logic as Xero, across every Zoho data centre.
• Issue an API key for a script. Scopes, the per-key rate limit, the one-time plaintext display, every endpoint, and the error codes.
• Automate a repetitive step. Five triggers and five actions in the rules engine, plus the older four-preset page and why they differ.

Where to go next

• Compliance & KYC. Companies House officers are the director list you file verification evidence against, and a PSC change raises a Refresh CDD task.
• Reports & Invoicing. Pulling and pushing invoices is one of the four ways an invoice gets into Accupe.
• Practice Management. A job status change is the most-used automation trigger, and only Complete jobs with a fee push to Xero or Zoho.