Proof

One system, running in production, doing real bookkeeping every day. Anonymised at the client’s discretion — the detail below is otherwise exactly as built.

Case study — a UK youth charity

The treasurer’s inbox, handled

The problem

A volunteer treasurer running the books for a charity with several units was losing evenings to turning email into bookkeeping. Requests to hire the hall, written in ordinary prose. Volunteers claiming back money they’d spent, with receipts attached as PDFs. Supplier invoices. The occasional overpayment needing a refund.

None of it was automatable with conventional tools. There was no form to parse and no consistent format — just messages that a person had to read, understand and act on correctly. Getting it wrong meant invoicing the wrong person, or miscategorising money in a charity’s accounts.

What we built

A system that runs once a day, unattended. It reads new email and any attachments, works out what treasurer action each one needs, and prepares it in QuickBooks — then sends a single summary of what it did.

• Raise an invoice — a hall-hire request in prose becomes a draft invoice against the right customer, at the right rate, split across the right units
• Pay a bill — a supplier invoice or a volunteer’s expense claim becomes a draft bill, with the amount read out of the attached PDF where the email doesn’t state it
• Refund a customer — an overpayment becomes a draft refund, posted so it can be matched against the real bank transaction when it clears
• Flag for attention — anything actionable but not confidently postable is listed with the reason, and retried automatically once the cause is fixed

One posting, start to finish

Names and figures illustrative. No form, no template, no integration to configure — just a sentence someone typed, and the right entry in the right account, left unsent.

The distinction between a volunteer being reimbursed for money they spent and a customer being refunded money they overpaid is a good example of the judgement involved. Same direction of travel for the money, completely different treatment in the accounts, and no rule can tell them apart from the text of an email.

How it stays safe

Nothing is ever sent or paid automatically. Invoices are created unsent; bills are created unpaid; refunds wait to be matched against the real bank movement. The treasurer reviews everything in QuickBooks, where they already reconcile — we built no new dashboard, because a dashboard is one more thing to remember to open.

The same email is never processed twice. Anything below a confidence threshold is escalated rather than guessed. Revisions to earlier requests are held for a human rather than posted.

What it costs to run

Pennies a day. Obvious newsletters and marketing mail are filtered out before they can cost anything. Names and accounts are resolved by lookup first, and only fall through to the model when the lookup can’t answer. As the lookups fill in, the running cost falls.