Hive Finance is a workspace app for service and project-based businesses that already run delivery work in Hive.
It connects your operational documents — estimates, expenses, purchase orders, billing worksheets, and customer invoices — to accounting, reconciliation, and financial reporting in the same workspace where your team manages projects and time.
Note: Hive Finance is separate from your Hive subscription billing.
Who Hive Finance is for
When you first open Finance, the Onboarding section helps you pick a business type and follow a tailored setup path. Common personas include:
Business type | Fit |
Small business owners (service/project businesses) | Core workflow |
Agencies and contractors | Core workflow |
Freelancers and self-employed (with team/project billing) | Supported with connected tools |
Bookkeepers and accountants/CPAs | Supported with connected tools |
Nonprofits | Core workflow |
How to enable Hive Finance
A workspace admin must turn on Finance before anyone can use it.
Open your workspace.
Go to Apps (or Hive Apps in workspace settings).
Find Finance under CRM & Finance.
Toggle Finance on for the workspace.
Assign finance permissions to the right team members (see Roles and permissions below).
Once enabled, users with the appropriate permissions will see Finance in the left app rail. You can also pin Finance to your sidebar for quick access.
Getting started
1. Start with Onboarding
Open Finance → Onboarding and select your business type. Hive will recommend the sections and steps most relevant to you — for example, configuring services and invoice layouts for a small business, or reviewing close checklists and tax exports for a bookkeeper.
2. Complete your Readiness checklist
Go to Finance → Readiness (Setup) to see your setup completion score, blocked sections, and recommended next steps. Before teams can bill, post, and report reliably, you should complete key setup tasks such as:
Services — Billable service codes and rates
Items — Billing, purchase, and expense items
Tax codes — Sales tax and jurisdiction settings
Dimensions — Legal entity, office, department, and class
Employees — Finance profiles, default services, and bill/cost rates
And more!
3. Connect integrations (optional but recommended)
QuickBooks Online — Sync customers, vendors, invoices, and bills with QuickBooks.
Plaid — Connect bank accounts to import transactions into Bank feeds, then categorize and post them.
4. Import opening balances (if migrating)
If you are moving from another system, use Finance → Migration to import trial balance, open accounts receivable (AR), and open accounts payable (AP). Run a dry-run first and review results before going live.
Navigating Hive Finance
Finance uses a left sidebar organized into these areas:
Home
Overview — Work queues, setup readiness, financial health metrics, and recent audit activity
Onboarding — Business-type setup guides
Setup
Master data and configuration: services, items, tax codes, dimensions, employees, numbering, accounting mappings, bank feeds, and bank rules.
Integrations
QuickBooks — Connection status, sync health, and reconnect
Plaid — Bank institution connections and manual sync
Selling
Estimates — Proposals, change orders, and approvals
Project budget versions — Approved budget snapshots from estimates
Project templates — Reusable finance templates from promoted projects
Purchasing
Expense reports — Employee expenses with approval workflows
Purchase orders — Vendor commitments and bill posting
Vendor tax — W-9/W-8 status and 1099 eligibility
Open payables — Approved expenses and POs ready for bill posting
Billing
Billing worksheets — Aggregate billable time, expenses, and PO lines before invoicing
Customer invoices — Draft, approve, send, and post invoices
Customer invoice layouts — How invoice line items are grouped and presented
Receipts — Invoice payments
Credit memos — Invoice credits
Retainers — Client prepayment balances
Advance billing — Deferred revenue
Revenue recognition — Recognition schedules
WIP — Work-in-progress posting batches
Planning
Cash forecast — 13-week forecast from billing pipeline, AR, AP, and planned adjustments
Accounting
Chart of accounts
Accounting periods — Open, close, reopen, and lock periods
Journal entries — Manual and system-generated journals
GL activity — Posted journal line detail
Posting batches — Links between source documents and journal entries
Reconciliations — Bank and account reconciliations
Fixed assets — Asset register and depreciation
Close checklist — Period-close readiness and blockers
Reports
Reports — Billing, profitability, AR/AP, GL, and financial statements
Tax export — Trial balance, adjusting journal entries, and period metadata for tax prep
Audit log — Cross-record finance activity history
Practice (for accounting firms)
Client books — Multi-client workspace close and approval view
Practice templates — Reusable COA, mappings, and report views
Consolidation — Parent/child workspace reporting
Intercompany — Matching and elimination rules
Period snapshots — Frozen GL snapshots for audit close packs
Migration & Admin
Migration — Opening balance and cleanup tools
Approval rules — Configurable approval routing
Allocation rules — Shared-service cost allocations
Tax providers — Tax calculation and nexus settings
Admin — Release and rollout controls (typically for Hive admins)
Core workflows
Most people open Finance for a specific job — send an invoice, approve an expense, close the month — but the steps aren’t always obvious if you’re new to the app.
Create Menu
Start here when: you need to create something in Finance and aren’t sure which type to use. The Create menu is the fastest way to start estimates, expense reports, purchase orders, billing worksheets, invoices, retainers, advance billing, and journal entries.
If you want to quick-start working in finance, use the Create button to create one of these:
Estimate
Expense report
Purchase order
Billing worksheet
Invoice
and more
Selling and project billing
Start here when: you need to quote work, track a project budget, or turn delivered work into a client invoice.
This is the main revenue path in Hive Finance: estimate → approved budget → time and expenses → billing worksheet → customer invoice → payment.
A typical project billing flow:
Create an estimate for the client/project.
Submit and approve the estimate.
Approve it into a project budget version (an immutable budget snapshot).
Team members log time and expenses against the project.
A billing manager creates a billing worksheet from billable sources.
A project manager reviews the worksheet.
Billing approves the worksheet.
Generate a customer invoice draft from the worksheet.
Approve, send, and post the invoice.
Record a receipt when payment is received.
Purchasing and payables
Start here when: you’re submitting expenses, creating purchase orders, or paying vendors.
This workflow covers how costs enter Finance: expense reports and POs go through approval, land in Open payables, and then get posted as bills with the right accounting entries. Example flows:
An employee submits an expense report, or a buyer creates a purchase order.
The document goes through your approval rules.
Approved items appear in Open payables.
Finance posts the bill, which creates the appropriate accounting entries.
Close checklist
Start here when: you’re reconciling accounts, reviewing financials, or closing an accounting period.
Close isn’t a single button — it’s a sequence: bank feeds, reconciliations, report review, blocker checks, then period close (and tax export if needed). Examples:
Review Bank feeds and apply bank rules for auto-categorization.
Complete reconciliations for bank and GL accounts.
Review the close checklist for blockers (unposted journals, open approvals, unreconciled accounts).
Run key reports (trial balance, AR/AP aging, P&L, balance sheet).
Close the accounting period when everything balances.
Export a tax export package for your CPA if needed.
Integrations
QuickBooks Online
Go to Finance → QuickBooks to:
Connect via OAuth
Monitor sync status
Reconnect if the connection expires
Hand off customers, vendors, invoices, and bills
QuickBooks is useful when you want Finance operational workflows in Hive while keeping QuickBooks as your external ledger or for specific export needs.
Plaid (bank feeds)
Go to Finance → Plaid to connect bank institutions. Imported transactions appear in Bank feeds, where you can:
Categorize transactions
Match them to GL accounts
Apply bank rules for automatic categorization
Post eligible transactions to the ledger
Plaid connection health and sync progress are visible in the Finance header and integration sections.
How Finance connects to other Hive apps
Hive Finance composes with existing Hive features rather than replacing them:
Projects — Live project budgets feed estimates and worksheets; Finance stores approved budget snapshots
CRM — Client and vendor records link to finance documents
Time tracking — Billable time flows into billing worksheets
Users — Employee profiles gain finance-specific fields (default service, bill rate, cost rate)
Troubleshooting
I don't see the Finance app
Confirm a workspace admin has enabled Finance under Apps.
Confirm you have at least one finance read permission.
Refresh the page or sign out and back in.
I can't post a document
Check whether the accounting period is closed or locked.
Review Accounting mappings — a "needs mapping" status means a required GL account is not configured.
Confirm your role includes post capability (typically Accountant or Finance admin).
Bank transactions aren't posting
Verify the Plaid connection is healthy under Finance → Plaid.
Check that the bank account is mapped to a GL account.
Review categorization status in Bank feeds — transactions may need manual categorization or rule matching first.
QuickBooks sync issues
Open Finance → QuickBooks and check connection status.
Use Reconnect if OAuth has expired.
Review sync error details before retrying.
Migration import failed
Run a dry-run first in Finance → Migration.
Confirm trial balance debits equal credits.
Verify chart of accounts and mappings exist before importing open AR/AP.
Permission denied on an action
Ask a workspace admin to review your team's finance permission gates.
Check whether you are an external/restricted member.
Confirm the workspace is not in finance read-only rollout mode.
Related articles
Introducing Buzz — Buzz can help guide you through Finance onboarding
Resource management — Time and utilization connect to billing worksheets
External users — How external members interact with workspace permissions
Need help?
If you run into an issue not covered here, contact Hive Support from your workspace or reach out to your Customer Success Manager.