Bookkeeping for an owner of several businesses

An owner runs several businesses: outlets, online projects, services. Money lives across seven accounts in four banks — personal cards, sole-proprietor business accounts, marketplace cards. Every month brings hundreds of transactions: revenue per business, salaries, purchases, ads, taxes, utilities. To know how much each business actually earned, everything has to be pulled together: statements from four banks, transactions recognised, split across businesses and categories.

What breaks with manual bookkeeping

Keeping the books was either "no time for it" or an evening wrestling match with spreadsheets. Each bank has its own statement format, payment descriptions don't say which business a transaction belongs to, and the same person can appear in different banks in different roles — salary in one, contractor in another. One wrong category distorts the whole month, and figuring out "where the money went" after the fact is useless.

Why banks and Excel didn't help

A bank shows the movements of one account, but it doesn't consolidate businesses and doesn't know that "transfer from so-and-so" is one business's revenue while "service payment" is another's expense. You can consolidate it in Excel, but someone has to go through every transaction by hand: hundreds of rows a month, dozens of categories, seven accounts. By the time last month is sorted, the new one has arrived — the books are always behind and nobody sees the current picture.

What we did: an agent-accountant runs the books itself

We built a bookkeeping cabinet and put an agent-accountant inside it that took over the whole mechanics: receiving statements, recognition, categorisation and reporting. The owner just forwards the statements to the agent — everything else happens on its own.

• The agent accepts a statement in any form — PDF, CSV, XLSX from any bank — and parses the format itself: personal cards have one structure, business accounts another, marketplace cards a third.
• It categorises transactions by rules: transaction type matters most, then key counterparties, characteristic revenue amounts and per-account markers. Anything doubtful is not guessed — it's marked "Unknown" and shown to a human.
• It allocates transactions across accounts and businesses and maintains the category directory, which grows as new counterparties appear.
• It builds a monthly profit-and-loss summary per business — what was earned, what was spent and on what exactly.
• It keeps several accounts in one place: statements merge into a single picture instead of living separately in different banks.

The owner doesn't need to learn anything

No new systems or formats: he forwards the bank statement to the agent as is — in the original form it arrived in. Format parsing, categorisation and reporting are the agent's job. The only skill needed is forwarding a file, and that skill already exists.

What stays with the human

Going through the rare unrecognised transactions and setting a rule for a new counterparty — once, and the agent recognises it from then on. The owner keeps the decisions made from numbers: which business is growing, where expenses eat the margin, where the money goes. The machine allocates and consolidates, the human manages — the routine goes to the agent.