Picture this: It’s 2021 at ‘Appy Camp, and Ben Stein from Keeper is standing at a bar, drink ticket in hand, ready to exchange it for a well-deserved cocktail after a long day of conference sessions. But when Alicia Katz Pollock rushes past—bass guitar case slung over her shoulder, racing to join the evening’s music circle around the fire—and tosses him her drink ticket with a hurried “Can you get me my drink?”, Ben doesn’t hesitate. He heads to the bar, discovers they’re not accepting drink tickets, and simply buys her a drink anyway.
That spirit of going above and beyond would prove fitting. Three years later, Ben’s company, Keeper, just launched an integration with Anchor that’s making accounting professionals everywhere take notice. When Katz Pollock brought together Stein and Tal Ben Bassat from Anchor for a special episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, the conversation revealed how real software partnerships actually happen.
The story isn’t about corporate strategy meetings or market research. It’s about two companies that actually listened when their customers said, “We want these apps to work together.” And then they did something most software companies don’t: they made it happen…
…like chocolate and peanut butter…better together!.
When Customers Become Your Product Team
Here’s what most software companies get wrong: they build features based on internal roadmaps instead of user requests. But when Stein’s team at Keeper and Ben Bassat’s team at Anchor started getting the same message from customers, both companies did something simple. They listened.
“Really, the idea came from our mutual customers,” Ben explains. “This is something that our customers asked for and Anchor’s customers asked for. We have a lot of overlapping customers and we want to keep them happy.”
Ben Bassat’s approach at Anchor takes this customer focus even further. “Everything we do on Anchor comes from our clients. Every feature, every development we have,” he says. “Our product team spends full days speaking to customers about what they need.”
The proof came after they launched. Stein admits it “caught my team off guard” with the response. “We go live with the integration, and all of a sudden, our support team was just inundated with dozens of tickets from Anchor customers and Keeper customers that were super excited about getting this up and running.”
This customer-driven approach creates a simple but powerful advantage: when your users tell you exactly what they need to work more efficiently, you don’t have to guess what to build next.
How the Integration Actually Works
For those not familiar with these tools, here’s what they do.
Anchor handles contracting and billing. Accountants can create proposals with multiple pricing tiers, get electronic signatures, and automatically invoice clients monthly. The invoices sync to QuickBooks Online. Keeper manages your bookkeeping workflows and checklists. It integrates with QBO so you can review transactions, ask client questions, and track your monthly procedures without jumping between systems.
Now here’s where the integration gets useful. When a client receives a proposal in Anchor, they can choose from different service packages and even agree to automatic annual price increases. Once they sign and connect payment information, the integration takes over automatically.
Based on your Anchor settings, the system auto-configures a client in Keeper, applying templates, creating tasks, and setting properties—all without manual work. “Once the client signs the agreement, Anchor will take the upfront payments. So you’re already clear on that. And then your team gets a notification and they start to work on Keeper immediately,” Ben Bassat explains.
This eliminates what Ben Bassat calls the traditional approach: “someone in your back office who starts organizing the onboarding process.” No more Excel spreadsheets tracking tasks. No more manual emails. No more wondering where each client stands in the pipeline.
Future updates will include amendment management. When you add services in Anchor, it will automatically trigger new workflows in Keeper. The integration keeps evolving based on what users really need.
Why Specialized Tools Beat All-in-One Platforms
Both companies made a conscious choice to focus on what they do best rather than trying to build everything. “No one can do everything perfectly. It’s not possible,” Ben Bassat explains.
His philosophy is clear: master your core function, then integrate with others who’ve mastered theirs. “Our approach on Anchor is not to give people a half-baked CRM experience or half-baked project management or practice management experience because it will not be as good. Keeper spent years developing their product.”
Stein agrees, recognizing that building billing software is “enormously complex.” Meanwhile, Keeper has spent years perfecting practice management and client communications that are “so deeply coupled to each other” that splitting them across multiple systems would create problems.
As Katz Pollock puts it, QuickBooks Online is like “a multifunction printer where it can print and it can copy and it can fax, but it doesn’t do any of them really, really well.” That’s why we have an entire ecosystem of specialized apps that excel at their one thing, and then connect to create something more powerful than any single platform.
Building the Integration Right
This wasn’t just two companies slapping together a quick connection. It was Keeper’s first major integration, and both teams approached it with their full attention.
“It surprised me how involved it was,” Stein reflects. “Anchor sort of took the whole process very seriously.” Keeper had to modify their API and release new endpoints specifically to support what Anchor needed.
Ben Bassat’s team matched that commitment. “Our approach is to deliver the best we can.” The development included extensive customer research, with Anchor’s product team speaking directly to Keeper users to understand their expectations.
The mutual respect between companies is evident in how they talk about each other. Stein praises Anchor’s authentic customer approach, while Ben Bassat marvels at Keeper’s user loyalty: “Clients are in love with the company, with the product. It’s something you don’t see a lot.”
When both companies share the same standards for quality, the collaboration works better.
The Bigger Picture
The Keeper-Anchor integration is a model for how accounting technology should evolve. When specialized companies listen to their customers and collaborate instead of competing, they create something more powerful than bloated platforms trying to do everything poorly.
The overwhelming user response—support teams flooded with excited customers wanting immediate access—shows that accountants recognize good tools that work together seamlessly. You don’t need another platform that does everything adequately. You need best-in-class solutions that communicate perfectly.
As these founders envision a future with universal bank APIs and seamless connectivity between all accounting apps, they’re describing an ecosystem where your software works as hard as you do. Where signing a proposal automatically sets up workflows, amendments in one system update tasks in another, and tools anticipate needs instead of creating more work.
When software companies prioritize partnership over competition and specialization over generalization, everyone wins. Your clients get better service. Your team gets better tools. And you get back to what you do best: serving clients instead of wrestling with software.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to this episode to discover how customer feedback drove this integration, what’s coming next, and why the future of accounting technology is specialized, connected, and customer-driven.
Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!
