FreeAgent is UK accounting software for freelancers, contractors, landlords and small limited companies, and for the accountants who look after them. It started in 2007 and has been owned by NatWest Group since 2018, though it runs independently.
That ownership explains the offer it’s best known for. FreeAgent is free with a NatWest, RBS or Ulster Bank business account, and with Mettle if the account is used each month.
It handles the UK tax cycle from VAT returns to Self Assessment, and it’s ready for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, compulsory since April 2026 for sole traders and landlords earning over £50,000.
Owners and accountants
Ease of use and human support come up most on Trustpilot, where FreeAgent scores 4.6 from more than 3,000 reviews.
Accountants like it too. It won “bookkeepers’ friendliest software” at the 2025 Luca Awards, and the dashboard accountants use to run their clients costs them nothing.
How Shopify and Amazon sales reach FreeAgent
FreeAgent is built around invoicing, which suits freelancers and service businesses best. Online sellers bring their sales in from their channels: FreeAgent’s Amazon add-on covers Amazon UK, and a partnership with Equali brings in sales from Shopify, Amazon, eBay and Etsy. Other channels connect through the API.
For a seller, that matters most at the bank feed. A £1,240 payout from Amazon is one line there, and somewhere inside it are 300 orders, minus whatever Amazon kept in fees and refunds. Somebody has to break that line back apart before the books are right.
Month-end, for a seller doing that by hand, is an evening of matching payouts to orders with a spreadsheet open. That’s not a sign of doing it wrong. The orders just haven’t been brought in yet.
Card payments and fees on invoices
Card payments come in through FreeAgent’s Stripe feed. It creates a Stripe bank account inside FreeAgent and imports Stripe’s transactions every morning, weekends included. When a customer pays a FreeAgent invoice through Stripe, the payment is marked against the invoice and the fee is explained as a bank charge, both left for approval. A payout that doesn’t match an open invoice gets explained by FreeAgent’s Guess feature, usually as sales, with the fee split out the same way.
When the money moves on to the main bank account, Guess explains it as a transfer between the two accounts. Refunds still need a person, because they aren’t explained automatically. And only payouts in the account’s base currency are imported, so a euro payout into a euro bank account stays out of FreeAgent.
Which bank feeds connect, and who maintains them
FreeAgent connects to most UK banks through Open Banking. Those feeds import once every 24 hours and only bring in transactions the bank has fully cleared, so weekend spending usually turns up on Tuesday. Open Banking consent lasts 90 days, and a feed whose consent isn’t renewed stops importing.
A few banks run their own connection. Mettle built an API feed in partnership with FreeAgent, and challenger banks such as Capital on Tap, Monzo, Revolut and Starling maintain their own integrations, so a feed that stops importing from one of them is a question for that bank’s support team.
A tidy API
FreeAgent’s is one of the easier APIs on this list. There’s a free sandbox, the developer docs are public and kept current, and the limits are written down plainly: 120 requests a minute and 3,600 an hour for each user. Access is free under FreeAgent’s API terms.
The hourly cap shapes the design. Posting a year of history as one invoice per order would take hours to go in, which is one reason to post a daily summary per channel instead. Accountants tend to prefer that anyway.
Integrations check FreeAgent for changes on a schedule. Stock items are read-only through the API, so stock usually lives in a dedicated system, with FreeAgent keeping the accounts. Bank transactions can go in, though: the API uploads a statement into a FreeAgent bank account.
Breaking a payout back into orders
FreeAgent leaves plenty of room to fit around the way a business already works. For an online seller, the usual job is a morning run that reads yesterday’s orders from every channel, totals each channel’s sales after fees and refunds, and posts one summary per channel, so a payout landing in the bank feed matches the summaries it covers.
Other links follow the same idea: an invoice raised the moment a deal is won in the CRM, or supplier bills picked up from email. The arithmetic for pricing that time shows which to build first.