Your client pays people through Kiip: a guide for accountants
Your client has started paying contractors, creators, or suppliers through Kiip, or is about to, and you want to know what that means for the books before you sign off on it. This page is the whole picture: what Kiip is in accounting terms, the one-time setup, the monthly routine, and exactly where every supporting document lives.
The short version: Kiip enters the client's books as one ordinary asset account, and every movement on that account is documented. Your client remains the legal payer of every payout. Kiip is the tool they pay with: it never holds the client's funds, never becomes a counterparty in the bookkeeping, and never decides accounting treatment. You do, once.
Setup: one asset account
Create one asset account for Kiip in the client's accounting system, exactly like adding a second bank account. "Kiip balance" sits on the balance sheet next to the bank account. The balance is the client's own money, in an account only the client controls, presented as ordinary USD or EUR. Kiip does not hold funds on behalf of its partners and cannot move them; every payout is authorized by the client. No new ledger structure, no special treatment.
Funding: a transfer between the client's own accounts
The client funds their Kiip account by bank transfer. In the books this is money moving between two of the client's own asset accounts. The bank feed shows the outgoing transfer; Kiip's monthly statement shows the matching top-up. The two reconcile against each other like any inter-account transfer.
The account mapping: you decide once
Kiip cannot know which expense account a payout belongs to. That depends on what the payment is for, and it is not Kiip's call to make. So before the first monthly import, you configure a one-time mapping in the client's Kiip settings:
- the Kiip asset account number in the client's books,
- a default account for the recipient leg of payouts,
- an account for Kiip's fee,
- optionally, per-tag overrides (for example, a payout tagged as a commission mapped to a different account than the default; the examples are illustrative, and the treatment is yours to decide).
The codes are free text. Kiip treats them as opaque strings, so any chart of accounts and any system (Xero, QuickBooks, Fiken, Tripletex, and so on) works. From then on, every monthly import applies your decision automatically. If the mapping is incomplete, the import refuses to generate rather than producing a file with blank accounts.
The monthly close: four downloads
Everything lives on one Accounting page, per month:
| Artifact | What you do with it |
|---|---|
| Accounting import file | One CSV import. Two lines per payout (recipient leg and fee leg) on the accounts you mapped, plus transfer lines for top-ups and withdrawals. |
| Document ZIP | All the period's supporting documents, filenames matching the import's voucher references, for bulk attachment. |
| Fee receipt | One document covering every Kiip fee line for the period, with the applicable VAT treatment stated (reverse charge for partners outside Kiip's home jurisdiction). |
| Account statement | PDF + CSV: opening balance, every movement labelled, closing balance. Compare the closing balance to the Kiip asset account: a single comparison. |
Import rows are dated on each payout's completion date and each line carries the payout's sequential document reference, so booking and attaching stay mechanical.
The vouchers
Every completed payout produces exactly one supporting document, automatically, at completion:
- Individuals: a payment statement (payer and payee identity, amount, date, description), the standard document for recipients who never issue invoices.
- Businesses, cross-border: a reverse-charge self-billing invoice with both parties' VAT details and the mandatory wording, issued under a self-billing agreement the recipient accepted at onboarding.
- Businesses, domestic: a domestic self-billing invoice, or the supplier's own invoice uploaded against the payout.
Documents carry gap-free sequential reference numbers (KP-2026-000041) per client, are stored durably at
Kiip, and are retrievable at any time, individually or in the monthly ZIP. The booking references the number;
the archive keeps the document for the retention period. (More on why that model is defensible:
What counts as a voucher for a payout?)
The guarantees that matter to you
- The statement covers 100% of balance movements. It is derived from the account's actual movement history, so it cannot silently drift from the real balance. Even money that arrives outside Kiip's flows appears as an explicit "Uncategorized deposit" line, like an unrecognised line on a bank statement, never as a hidden discrepancy.
- The import and the statement come from the same ledger. If the statement reconciles, the bookings do.
- Kiip never picks tax treatment. No suggested accounts, no VAT decisions made for you. The division of labour is fixed: you decide the treatment once; the tool applies it every month.
Your own judgement (expense classification, VAT positions, any withholding or reporting the client's situation triggers) stays exactly where it belongs. What changes is that the data and documents you need for those calls always exist, without anyone chasing them.
Kiip is not an accounting firm and does not provide bookkeeping services or accounting advice. This guide describes what the tool produces; every treatment decision remains with you and your client.
If your client is asking about Kiip
The setup is an afternoon: one asset account, one account mapping, one funding transfer. From there the monthly close is four downloads and one comparison. Have your client create an account at dashboard.kiip.app, or read how the whole flow looks from the company's side in How to pay people and companies anywhere in the world.