Faster organisation, Direct Debit tagging, and AI descriptions: New in January

January brings three major feature releases to Apron, each designed to give you more control and clarity over your business spend, giving you more time — because running your business is already a full-time job, you don’t need another one paying bills.

So, what’s new?

Payment Cycles: Organise payables with ease

Wish that you had help organising certain bills, but still want to review and pay them with full control? Welcome to Cycles.

With Cycles, you can automatically organise payables according to when you want to pay them:

• Before the due date — Assuming a weekly schedule, this option batches together all bills due in the next seven days.
• After the due date — Assuming a weekly schedule, this option batches together all bills due in the previous seven days.
• Around the due date — Assuming a bi-weekly schedule, this option batches together bills due in the previous 7 days and the next 7 days.

You can set a Cycle to occur weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. You’ll get an email showing you which bills are ready to review and pay.

Cycles don’t automatically pay bills on your behalf. What it does do, is to lighten the load required to create and organise payment batches. It’s one more tedious job that you can drop from your to-do list.

Taggable Direct Debit invoices

While it’s useful to see suppliers that are typically paid via Direct Debit in your account, you don’t want to risk paying them twice.

You can now tag those suppliers that are paid via Direct Debit, so that they’re greyed out in your feed. This reduces the risk of you accidentally paying them twice.

For even finer control, you can mark individual bills as payable, in case you need to make an ad-hoc payment to a Direct Debit supplier.

AI-generated document descriptions

New to Capture, AI-generated descriptions speed up document processing, while providing essential context for everyone involved.

When you upload a document to Capture — via email, the app, or WhatsApp — you have the option to enter a description (e.g. Window fitter for the new shop). Our research revealed that not everyone does enter a description.

But descriptions are handy, and can stop unnecessary chasing and questions. So, we introduced AI-generated document descriptions.

When you upload a document, Capture scans it to determine its content, before providing three AI-generated descriptions for you to edit or accept.

If you prefer to enter your descriptions manually, you may continue to do so.

These latest additions are the first in a series of exciting developments coming to Apron in 2025.

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