With the finAPI interface, ZEP retrieves the transactions of your business account and places them next to your open invoices under Billing > OP reconciliation. For every incoming payment, ZEP proposes the matching invoice, and one click documents the payment. finAPI is the provider through which the connection to the bank runs.
Data direction: bank → ZEP
Product Line Availability
Note: The finAPI interface is included in ZEP Operations and ZEP Business.
The interface requires the Invoicing area, as the reconciliation runs against your outgoing invoices from ZEP.
Administrators and system administrators set up the bank account. Everyone whose role has the Bankabgleich permission works in the OP reconciliation. By default, this is the Administrator.
Requirements
For the setup you need:
A current account at a bank that participates in PSD2 online banking access. Other account types such as savings, securities or credit card accounts are not offered.
The online banking credentials for that account and the means of approval, that is a TAN procedure or banking app
The Invoicing area, so that open invoices exist
The Administrator or System Administrator role in ZEP
Tip: Signing in at your bank takes place in a window provided by finAPI. Allow pop-up windows for ZEP in your browser beforehand, otherwise the setup stops with a corresponding message.
Note: The transactions of your business account may include payments that are sensitive in terms of data protection, such as salaries. Before setting up the connection, check under Administration > My Company > Roles & Permissions which roles have the Bankabgleich permission. With View a role sees the transactions in the OP reconciliation, with Edit it can also assign transactions to invoices. By default, only the Administrator has this permission.
Activating the Interface
As soon as you connect a bank account, ZEP activates the interface automatically. So you can start directly with Connecting a bank account. If you want to activate the interface yourself beforehand or deactivate it later, use the Interface Marketplace.
Open Administration > Interfaces > Interface Marketplace, select the finAPI card and click Configure. Unlike with other interfaces, you do not enter any credentials here: ZEP signs in to finAPI with credentials of its own.
Note: The button reads Test connection, but it activates the interface at the same time. So there is nothing to prepare before you press it. The interface is then in place and the next step is the bank account.
You can deactivate the interface again on the same page at any time. Transactions already retrieved are kept. If you then connect another bank account, ZEP activates the interface again.
Connecting a Bank Account
Open Administration > My Company > Bank details. The list shows the bank accounts of your company.
If the account has not been created yet, choose Create new bank account and fill in at least Short form and IBAN. The IBAN is the decisive entry: from it, ZEP determines which bank the sign-in leads to. A transposed digit therefore leads to the wrong bank or to none at all. Save with Save and connect with FinAPI.
If the account already exists, choose the Connect with FinAPI action in its row.
ZEP opens a window provided by finAPI. Select your bank there, sign in with your online banking credentials and approve the access with a TAN or your app.
Close the window. ZEP reports Connection established successfully and the row changes to the status Active.
Note: You enter your online banking credentials exclusively in the finAPI window. That window does not belong to ZEP, the sign-in takes place there directly between you and your bank.
After you sign in, ZEP opens the Select accounts window with the accounts of your bank access. All accounts that have not been created yet are already checked. Uncheck any account ZEP should not retrieve, such as a private account. In the Bank account column, you assign an account to an existing bank account without an IBAN or leave it at Create new. Accounts that already exist in ZEP are marked already created. With Save, ZEP creates the selected accounts as bank accounts.
Accounts of a connected access that are not assigned to a bank account appear in the list under Unassigned finAPI accounts. There you can take them over later with Assign or remove them with Delete connection.
Once connected, the list shows Status, Balance, TX (30 Days) and Incoming (Month) for each account. ZEP starts the first retrieval right after connecting, covering the past 90 days. After that, ZEP retrieves the transactions once a day at night.
Note: Only your company’s bank accounts are listed here. Bank accounts you have assigned to a department cannot be connected to finAPI.
Extending the Approval
The approval you have granted your bank is limited in time. The status in the list tells you where you stand:
Active — the connection is in place, transactions are being retrieved.
Expires — about two weeks before the approval ends, the status switches to this value and is highlighted in yellow. Transactions keep arriving. Choose Extend in the row and the retrieval never stops in the first place.
Expired — the approval has ended, no further transactions arrive. Choose Reactivate.
Not connected — the account exists in ZEP but is not connected to the bank.
Extend and Reactivate both lead to the same finAPI window as the initial setup. You sign in at your bank again and grant the access anew.
Note: ZEP points out an expiring approval through this status in the list of bank accounts and nowhere else. You will not receive an email about it. So take a look at the list now and then, ideally before you work with the reconciliation.
Disconnect ends the connection. Transactions already retrieved remain in ZEP, no new ones are added.
Retrieving Transactions
After the first retrieval, ZEP retrieves the transactions once a day at night. You will not always want to wait for that, for instance when you are expecting a payment.
In that case, open the detail page of the interface in the Interface Marketplace and choose Start synchronisation under Quick actions. ZEP reports Synchronisation started and retrieves the transactions of every connected account.
On the same page, the dashboard shows when the last retrieval ran and how many records it brought in.
Reconciling Transactions and Invoices
The daily work takes place under Billing > OP reconciliation. The page has two tables which you switch between at the top right: Revenues and Invoices. ZEP remembers which table you had open last.
Reading the Match Levels
In the Revenues table, the Match/Status column is the most important one. It states how confident ZEP is about its proposal:
Confident — the invoice number appears in the payment reference and the amount matches the open amount of the invoice to the cent. Upper and lower case as well as spaces, hyphens and slashes in the invoice number make no difference.
Check — ZEP has found an invoice, but the assignment is not unambiguous. That is the case for a partial payment, for a match based on the customer name alone, or when the invoice found has already been paid. A paid invoice takes no further payment. In that case, assign the transaction to a different invoice or choose Do not assign to any invoice.
No match — ZEP has not found a matching invoice, for example with rent, salaries or bank charges.
Once a transaction has been decided, the same column shows the outcome: Assigned for a documented payment, No assignment for a transaction that belongs to no invoice.
Example: An incoming payment of 1,190 euros with the payment reference "RG-2026-0042" matches invoice RG/2026/0042 for 1,190 euros as Confident. If 500 euros arrive instead, an amount stays open and ZEP shows Check.
Assigning a Transaction
Three actions are available per row:
Apply suggestion — the proposed invoice is documented as paid.
Assign invoice — you choose the invoice yourself. The window shows booking date, amount, client and payment reference for checking, and below them the Invoice selection list with invoice number, amount and title. If a proposal already exists, the action reads Assign a different invoice.
Do not assign to any invoice — the transaction leaves the working list and is set to No assignment.
If a transaction does not settle the invoice in full, you decide while assigning whether the remaining amount stays open or is written off. Writing it off closes the invoice with an open amount of zero. Only invoices with an open amount can be assigned. A decision already made can be changed with Edit assignment. There you select a different invoice, or you undo the assignment by choosing the empty entry and saving. If you are unsure about an invoice, open the Preview from the invoice number and look at the document without leaving the OP reconciliation.
Several Transactions at Once
Two bulk actions are available for similar rows. Choose Accept confident matches on this page or Ignore transactions without matches on this page. The action covers all transactions on the page displayed, so you do not need to mark individual rows. ZEP only touches the rows the action actually applies to and afterwards reports how many of them were affected.
Warning: Both bulk actions apply exclusively to the page of the table currently displayed, not to every match of a filter, and they cannot be undone. A maximum of 100 transactions can be processed per call.
Letting Confident Matches Book Themselves
Open Administration > Interfaces > Interface Marketplace, select the finAPI card and click Configure. Once the interface has been set up, the button reads Manage. There, the Open item reconciliation section holds the Automatically book confident matches checkbox. It is set by default. When it is set, ZEP documents an unambiguous match as a payment while the transactions are being retrieved, without any action on your part. Only the cases that need a decision then reach the OP reconciliation.
Switch the checkbox off if you want to confirm every payment yourself. An unambiguous match then also appears as a proposal with the level Confident and waits for your click.
Note: The automation applies to unambiguous matches only. Partial payments, matches based on the customer name and matches on an invoice that has already been paid are never booked automatically, they are always presented to you.
Adding Payments Without a Bank Transaction
Not every reduction has a bank transaction behind it. If a customer deducts a cash discount, a small amount stays open after the payment arrives even though the invoice is settled. You add that remainder directly at the invoice.
To do so, switch to the Invoices table in the OP reconciliation. The Amount received column holds two icons per row: Open Incoming Payment shows the payments already recorded, New Incoming Payment creates an entry. If the invoice has been settled in full, creating one is blocked.
In the form you choose between Payment and Reduction (e.g. cash discount) under Type and enter the date, the Gross amount and a Comment. Reductions appear in the overview that Open Incoming Payment shows, in a column of their own called Reduction, so that payment and reduction stay apart.
Note: Entries that originate from an assigned bank transaction can neither be changed nor deleted here. That applies to manual entries and reductions only. Correct a wrong assignment with Edit assignment in the Revenues table.
Limits of Bank Reconciliation
Six points matter when working with bank reconciliation:
ZEP does not transfer money. The interface reads transactions. You continue to initiate payments in your own online banking.
Current accounts only. Securities, credit card and savings accounts cannot be connected.
Outgoing invoices. The reconciliation runs against the invoices from ZEP invoicing.
Incoming payments. The reconciliation documents payments coming in against your invoices. The list is therefore filtered to Incoming Payments by default.
No currency conversion. Transaction and invoice must be in the same currency.
A transaction belongs to exactly one invoice. If a customer settles several invoices with one transfer, assign the transaction to one of them and record the others through the payment documentation. After assigning by hand, a look at the Open column pays off: it shows right away whether the invoice is settled.