FreeAgent

Otto Capture connects to FreeAgent so you can publish bills and sales invoices straight into your client’s FreeAgent company. For the connection basics, see Connecting your accounting platform.

Connecting

There are two ways to connect FreeAgent: a Company connection for a single business you run, or a Practice connection for adding clients from your FreeAgent practice.

Company

A Company connection maps one FreeAgent company to one client in Capture. The person who authorises the connection needs permission to manage Bills in that company.

From the Clients page in Capture, click Add client, then choose the FreeAgent option described as I run my own business
Sign in to FreeAgent and authorise Capture for the company
You’ll be redirected back to Capture, and the company is connected as a single client

Practice

If you’re a FreeAgent practice, you connect once and then add any of your managed clients. You don’t authorise each client separately.

From the Clients page in Capture, click Add client, then choose the FreeAgent option described as Add a FreeAgent client from your practice
Capture shows the Add FreeAgent clients page, listing your practice’s FreeAgent clients with their entity type
Tick the clients you want and click Add selected clients. Capture creates a client for each, with its own inbox and setup

Every client you add this way shares the one practice connection, so there’s a single sign-in to keep healthy. Adding more later needs no new authorisation, just another visit to the Add FreeAgent clients page, where clients you’ve already added are marked Connected and only the rest can be selected.

Screenshot of the Add FreeAgent clients page, listing practice clients by entity type with selection checkboxes — Tick the practice clients to onboard, then click Add selected clients. Clients you've already added show a Connected label and can't be selected again.

Permissions

The authorising user needs permission to manage Bills in FreeAgent. Capture uses this access only to read the reference data it needs and to publish bills and invoices, nothing else. If Capture’s access isn’t high enough, the client moves to Connection failed, and someone with the right permission needs to reconnect it before Otto can sync or publish.

What syncs after connecting?

Once connected, Capture syncs the following from FreeAgent:

Data	Purpose
Contacts	Match suppliers and customers to extracted document data
Categories	Assign nominal codes to line items
Tax rates	Apply the correct tax treatment to line items
Currencies	Set the document currency
Organisation details	Base currency and other details needed to process documents correctly

Publishing

When Otto publishes to FreeAgent:

Bills enter the ledger as soon as they’re published.
Sales invoices are created as Draft.

VAT reporting status

FreeAgent records a VAT reporting status on each document. Otto supports two:

Status	When to use
UK VAT rates	The default, for standard UK VAT treatment
Reverse charge	When the document falls under the reverse charge

Whether a company accepts a non-default status depends on its own FreeAgent VAT settings, which FreeAgent checks when Otto publishes.

Currencies

FreeAgent supports a fixed set of currencies and applies its own exchange rate, so a document in any supported currency, base or not, publishes without extra confirmation. If a document is in a currency FreeAgent doesn’t support, convert the amounts before publishing.

Attachments

Otto attaches the original document to bills in FreeAgent, up to 5 MB, in PDF, PNG, JPEG, or GIF format. Sales invoices are published without an attached file. Either way, the original document stays in Capture.

Disconnecting and reconnecting

Disconnecting a client in Capture stops syncing and publishing on Capture’s side. To fully revoke Capture’s access to FreeAgent, remove it from inside FreeAgent’s own settings. Reconnecting from the client settings triggers a fresh data sync and resumes publishing.