Mercury bank bookkeeping: four ways to keep your books

Mercury gives you the transactions, and you still need the books

Mercury holds your money, cards and payments. It produces the transaction list, statements and receipts. It is not a ledger, so it cannot give you a balance sheet, a reconciled month or a closed period on its own.

Mercury's own accounting page says data flows into your books without manual statement downloads and uploads, that AI assigns general ledger codes based on similar past transactions, and that you can review and adjust the coding before it syncs. Receipts are matched to transactions by email. Those steps prepare the data, and an accounting tool records it.

Four ways to do your books with Mercury

Mercury Books is the cheapest and most direct choice when everything lives at Mercury, and Mercury says it has no stated cap on advisor seats. A separate tool makes sense when you also use other banks, run more than one company, or want the books in a place your CPA already knows.

How Mercury's QuickBooks integration works

You connect QuickBooks from Mercury under Settings, then Integrations. Mercury then maps each Mercury account to a QuickBooks ledger account, and an optional setting called Enrichment adds auto-categorization and syncs GL codes, classes, receipts, notes and vendor details. Mercury says it uses AI and your categorization history to pre-fill codes, marks suggestions with a sparkle icon and lets you overwrite them.

By default, transactions you mark Ready sync to QuickBooks on a daily schedule. Mercury says a failed sync is not retried automatically, so check the Synced tab for failures. That step is easy to miss until a month will not reconcile.

Connect Mercury to another tool with a read-only token in six steps

1. 1

   Step 1: You need to be an admin on the Mercury account, because only users with the right permission can create tokens.

2. 2

   Step 2: In Mercury, click your organization's name at the top left and choose All Settings.

3. 3

   Step 3: Open Tokens in the left menu and click Create an API Token.

4. 4

   Step 4: Choose Read Only. Mercury says read-only tokens do not need an IP allowlist, while read and write tokens do.

5. 5

   Step 5: Copy the token. It begins with secret-token:mercury_ and Mercury shows it only once.

6. 6

   Step 6: Paste it into your accounting tool. A read-only token can read accounts, transactions and statements, and cannot send money.

Mercury deletes an API token that is not used in any 45-day period, and emails account admins seven days before. A tool that syncs every day keeps it alive. Accountable syncs daily and starts posting every Mercury account, including checking, savings, treasury and cards, within minutes. See connect Mercury with a read-only API token.

Three Mercury lines are booked wrong most often

• Moves between your own Mercury accounts. A transfer from checking to savings or Treasury is not spending or income. Match both sides so they cancel out.
• Credit card payments. Paying the Mercury card from checking moves money to a liability you already recorded when the card was swiped. Booking the payment as an expense counts every purchase twice.
• Stripe payouts. A deposit from Stripe is net of fees and refunds, so it should clear a Stripe clearing account instead of being booked as revenue. The Stripe accounting guide shows the entries.

Reconcile each Mercury account to its monthly statement and expect a difference of $0.00. The AI bookkeeping accuracy guide explains why the statement, not the bank feed, is the proof.