Holded Connection Guide with Mangobeds

The Accounting app keeps your property’s books in Mangobeds: revenue and payments come from your invoices automatically, you record what you spend, and the whole period exports as a journal. If your bookkeeper works in Holded, you can skip the export. Connect it once and Mangobeds posts the journal into your Holded company instead.

This guide covers connecting Holded, mapping your chart of accounts, running a sync, and what to do when a day fails.

What the Holded connection actually does

Mangobeds stays the place you manage accounting. Your expenses are recorded here, the summary and the period totals are here, and the CSV export is still available. What the connection adds is one more destination: when you press Sync, each day’s journal is posted into Holded as a ledger entry (an asiento contable).

Nothing flows the other way. Mangobeds never reads your Holded invoices, never changes anything you or your bookkeeper entered there, and never deletes anything.

Before you start

You need two things in Holded: an account that can generate an API key, and a chart of accounts already set up in the company you are connecting. Mangobeds will refuse to connect to a company with no accounts, because there would be nothing to map your journal to.

Getting your Holded API key

In Holded, open Settings and then API, and generate a new key. Holded shows the key once and never again, so copy it straight across to Mangobeds rather than closing the page and coming back.

The key carries the permissions you grant it, and it is yours rather than ours. That is also what makes disconnecting simple: there is no app of ours sitting in your Holded account, so revoking the key in Holded is enough to cut us off at any time.

Connecting Holded

Open Apps and then Accounting for the property whose books you are connecting. Accounting is per property, so each one connects to its own Holded company.

Go to the Sync tab, click Connect an accounting system, pick Holded, paste the key, and click Connect.

Mangobeds checks the key against Holded before saving anything, so a mistyped key tells you straight away instead of failing silently on your first sync. If you have not set the Accounting app up yet, you can also pick Holded on the setup screen and do both in one step.

Mapping your chart of accounts

This is the step worth doing carefully, and it takes a few minutes with your bookkeeper.

A ledger entry has to name the account each amount lands in. Once you are connected, the account fields in Settings turn into dropdowns listing your Holded company’s real chart of accounts.

There are two groups. Transaction accounts are the six that come out of your invoices and payments: accommodation revenue, extras revenue, tax collected, accounts receivable, deposits held and bank. Expense categories are the twelve expense types, one account each.

One thing makes Holded gentler to adopt than most. Holded references an account by its number, which is exactly what the Mangobeds account fields already hold. So if you had already typed your PGC codes in for the CSV export, your mapping is correct the moment you connect, and the dropdowns only save you from typos.

If an account you need is missing, create it in Holded first and it appears in the dropdown.

Syncing

Syncing is a button, not a schedule. Open the Sync tab and press Sync now when you sit down to reconcile.

That is deliberate. An automatic nightly post drops entries into periods your accountant may be about to close, and it does it while nobody is watching. A button means the entries arrive when you are there to see what happened.

A sync looks back up to 62 days, ending yesterday, and today is left out because the day is not over. It posts one ledger entry per day, carrying that day’s invoices, payments and expenses. It skips any day it has already posted, so pressing Sync twice cannot double up your books, and if everything is already posted it simply tells you so. A day that failed last time is tried again on the next sync.

The 62-day window is there so connecting today does not dump your whole history into your books. Your opening balance is your accountant’s own entry, not ours.

Reading the sync history

Under the button is a list of every day Mangobeds has tried to post, newest first, with how many journal lines it carried and how it went.

Synced means the entry is in Holded. Failed means something went wrong and the day will be tried again on your next sync, with the exact message Holded returned kept on the row. Each row also has a three-dot menu that exports that single day as a CSV, which is the quickest way to hand a stubborn day to your bookkeeper to enter by hand.

Disconnecting

Disconnect on the Sync tab stops Mangobeds posting to Holded and forgets your key. What was already posted stays in Holded, because those entries are genuinely part of your books. Your account mapping goes back to the default codes, and your sync history is kept so you can still see what was sent and when.

If you regenerate or delete the key inside Holded instead, Mangobeds will notice on the next sync and ask you to connect again with a new one. Nothing is lost in the meantime.

Connecting a different key is treated as a fresh start: the sync history is cleared, because those days were posted to the old company and were never posted to the new one.

What Mangobeds sends, exactly

Each ledger entry is dated with the day it covers and noted with that same date, so you can trace an entry back to its day.

An invoice records what you are owed against what you earned, splitting accommodation, extras and tax apart. A payment moves that amount from what you are owed into your bank, and a refund does the reverse. A security deposit goes to the deposits held account instead, because it is the guest’s money you are holding. An expense records the cost against its category’s account and takes the money out of your bank.

Debits and credits always balance, which is the check that tells your bookkeeper the entry is sound.

Getting started

Generate the key, connect the company, spend five minutes on the account mapping with your bookkeeper, then press Sync. Look at the first few entries in Holded before you trust it with a full month. Once the mapping is right, reconciling stops being a data-entry job.