How AI Is Changing Bookkeeping

This and other data analysis front ends could be a fantastic application for LLMs + tool use.

It’s also a market where getting the wrong answer could result in huge liability, so at this point you’re really rolling the dice that you’re a great LLM whisperer. (There’s no such thing as an LLM engineer, at least not yet.)

That’s exactly the question we’re testing. Will this feel like the future of bookkeeping, or just another tool? We’re launching the beta in a week and are eager to see how real users respond. Curious what you think would make this genuinely useful vs. gimmicky?

We’re tackling ingestion primarily through direct bank connections. Users connect their bank and financial accounts, and transactions flow into our system automatically. From there, we store the data in a structured database and normalize it into a consistent internal format so it can be aggregated and queried reliably.

Right now, the ingestion layer handles most of the heavy lifting—parsing the raw feeds, mapping fields into a standard schema, and ensuring consistency across institutions. Our next version will include layering AI to help with classification and enrichment (e.g. categorizing ambiguous transactions, detecting anomalies, and filling in context where the raw data is thin).

So it’s a mix: the ingestion pipeline makes the data uniform, while AI helps make it more useful and accurate for analysis. As we move toward our “agentic” roadmap, we see AI playing a bigger role in automating the messy parts of ingestion as well.

We thought about just building an AI plugin for QuickBooks, but decided to build our own platform instead. Harder path, but bigger upside.

Fair, QuickBooks does market their software towards every small business owner not just accountants. But even so, small business owners still spend hours on entry and categorization. It's enough that most community colleges teach QuickBooks courses. We want to go further: let owners ask questions in plain language and get answers instantly, no menus or reports needed. Our upcoming versions will include agentic capabilities to send invoices, and do much more all from one AI UI.