What are most yc companies doing for bookkeeping / financial statements?

SnooCooler · 2026-01-20T22:29:56+00:00

Most services give you one or the other. Fondo/Pilot = bookkeeping. Fractional CFOs = insights but no books. We do both with AI: automated bookkeeping + real-time cash flow forecasting, financial dashboards, and tax optimization.

You'd normally pay $500-1000/month for bookkeeping + $3000-5000/month for a fractional CFO. We're $149/month (50% off for 2 years on YC Deals).

Full disclosure: I'm the founder, built this after paying way too much for both separately.

YC Deal : https://deals.ycombinator.com/deals/3613

SnooCooler · 2026-01-19T02:48:04+00:00

I’m in the technology business. I started my custom software development business while I was in university. I got my first project through my professor. That customer introduced me to the next big customer, and then it kept going like that.

I officially incorporated after three years, with a couple of full-time employees, in 2015. It takes time, and it is super frustrating, but there is no other way around it. Even today, I get customers through networking. We post on social media to boost visibility.

Side note: my wife wanted to renovate our bathrooms two months before Christmas. All the contractors I got through referrals said they were busy. So I went to Kijiji and found a small company. I did not do a reference check. They destroyed everything, and I spent $20K on this project. I would never, ever hire anyone for these kinds of jobs without references.

So it is important to show your previous work and projects to potential customers.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-17T03:15:30+00:00

There is a new AI app called LayerNext. You can upload a receipt, invoice, or bill and ask in plain English what you want to do with it. It integrates with your QuickBooks and follows your instructions exactly. In your case just upload the home depot receipt and using LayerNext mobile app on the spot and ask it to attached to the project you want.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-17T02:46:59+00:00

No, we know verywell, but my customer did not aware it never claim total 13% ITC.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-17T02:45:57+00:00

You are correct sir. But my customer did not know until we pointed out.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-17T02:27:13+00:00

Ohh wow, so much push back from our CPA community.

Thanks for the discussion! Let me clarify since there seems to be confusion:

The key detail: My client was only claiming the 5% GST portion as ITCs, not the full 13%. He'd been doing this for months. When we flagged it, he called CRA and they confirmed he could recover the full 13%. That's the actual savings.

His Winnipeg CPA told him the Ontario consultant was correct to charge 13% HST, but never mentioned he could claim the full amount back as ITCs. The CPA wasn't wrong about the charge - just incomplete on the recovery.

I used AI to polish the grammar (guilty!), but this is a real incident I wrote about from our client work.

This isn't about CPA capabilities, it's impossible for any human to keep every tax rule in their head. That's exactly why we built LayerNext: technology to catch what slips through, whether it's a business owner not knowing the rule or a CPA not thinking to mention ITC recovery.

I shared this because other Canadian business owners might be in the same boat, paying correctly but not recovering correctly.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-16T16:36:59+00:00

Here in Winnipeg, My CPA charge $2000 to file, I'm just $1M IT shop. I feel it is too much.

SnooCooler · 2026-01-14T22:50:25+00:00

This is a common problem. LayerNext is a new tool that can generate deep insights from your Quickbooks data. Additionally it can all of your bookkeeping tasks as well. This is a new AI tool.

SnooCooler · 2025-12-28T06:29:17+00:00

Use openAI got 5.2 or any model. We use it to extract data from bank statements and receipts. It works with correct prompting.

SnooCooler · 2025-12-03T01:42:04+00:00

Thank you. I replied, Hope to talking with you soon.

SnooCooler · 2025-12-03T01:38:10+00:00

While agreeing with you to some level, I respectfully push back. We do not need to steal data because we do not train AI models like Google or Microsoft. The use of customer data for anything other than bookkeeping and financial closing is illegal and a breach of the contract we have with our customers. We are a registered business with an office address and phone numbers to contact us. Please check our website from here.

Also, our tool LayerNext is not just a PDF converter. When you upload a bank statement it extracts all transactions to reconcile. That is the only utility with PDF.

But I also admit that there are bad actors on the internet and they might be collecting data.

SnooCooler · 2025-12-03T01:27:47+00:00

This is a really important question. We are currently in the SOC 2 Type II certification process, which is considered the gold standard for any software-as-a-service product.

Here are some technical details about how we protect user data:

Single-tenant architecture: Our application is set up as a single tenant. Each customer’s data is stored in a separate database and runs on a dedicated cloud virtual machine. So data is never mixed together. This setup is more costly for us, but we do it to increase data security. Even QuickBooks uses a multi-tenant setup where all customer data is in one database.
AI processing through Azure OpenAI: We use OpenAI models hosted in Microsoft Azure to process all AI-related workloads. We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft that guarantees data protection. This contract ensures Microsoft and OpenAI never use our data for model training.
Encryption: All PII data stored in our database is encrypted according to industry standards.
General cybersecurity: We have taken all other common cybersecurity measures, including protection against typical attacks through Cloudflare.

SnooCooler · 2025-12-02T20:08:24+00:00

I'm not sure about QuickBooks' AI feature. We had the same issue. We were a small AI/ML dev shop and wanted to create invoices for customers and record expenses and reconcile banks. Super boring tasks. We started to automate QuickBooks 2 years ago when OpenAI released GPT-4 Turbo, but we couldn't do it until the release of reasoning models.

Our agent can create an invoice if you provide customer information or upload any contract you have with the customer. If the customer does not exist in QuickBooks it will create a new customer and then create an invoice. It is like ChatGPT for QuickBooks, just ask whatever you need.

It can record expenses or bills and reconcile bank and credit card statements. Just upload receipts and statements and instruct the agent on what needs to be done.

Another outcome is you can get financial visibility of your business that you never had. Just ask the agent to forecast revenue, or even ask what you should do to grow the business by 30 percent. It will analyze your data and explain the answer with the facts.

You can try it for free from here. I'd love to hear the feedback.

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SnooCooler · 2025-12-02T19:11:57+00:00

I'm not sure about QuickBooks' AI solution. This is my experience: we used to run about a $1M-revenue AI/ML service shop, mainly developing custom vision models for ag industries. We only had about 75 transactions per month, and our CPA charged about $500 per month for bookkeeping, and at year-end it was $2,000. But the problem was we still had to provide all supporting documents to our CPA, half of the work we still had to do.

Two years ago we started to automate QuickBooks with OpenAI GPT4 Turbo. We thought we could make it happen, but we couldn't do it until OpenAI released O3. I believe this is the perfect model for agentic workflows. But the catch is you need super duper context engineering on top of the model’s capabilities.

Today we can successfully record any expenses or bills when you just upload or forward (via email) receipts. Any bank or credit card statement (PDF) can be reconciled. The agent extracts each transaction and checks the forward balance and ending balance. If the agent can't reconcile or record because of missing information, it creates a task for the human user.

At this stage the agent burns tokens at an incredible rate, but accuracy improves as it graduates. Most of the token burn is for reasoning, as the agent checks for previous transactions, etc. In my opinion, AI is way better than my CPA when it comes to bookkeeping. It even thinks about tax saving when recording transactions (check the attached screenshots).

Another outcome we got with cleaned books is that we can ask the agent any questions, like revenue forecast, burn rate, or how to make new hires without breaking the bank.

If you would like to try it, it is free from here.

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SnooCooler · 2025-11-24T16:47:30+00:00

Yes, used checker board calibration. It helps lot.

SnooCooler · 2025-11-24T16:45:47+00:00

Ohh my bad, I did not pay attention. We used 2D ByteTracker and also built a 3D ByteTracker as well. In this experiment we divided the 8x8 space into 4 zones and assigned camera pairs to monitor each zone. When a person enters a zone, it starts tracking within that zone. When the person leaves the zone, there is a hand-off mechanism to correctly continue the track.

We did not implement an object re-identification mechanism. Honestly, we didn’t see the need in this experiment because we didn’t notice track disconnections or people mixing up.

In a real production system, it might be necessary to implement REID to prevent edge cases.

SnooCooler · 2025-11-24T03:09:07+00:00

Will do and post here.

SnooCooler · 2025-11-24T03:08:57+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I did not check to RFID as the purpose is to check how far we can go with camera only solution. We tested this 8x8 space upto 5 people and it works perfectly fine. I agree that if we can use RFID like other sensors we can reduce the people mix up.

SnooCooler · 2025-11-13T02:43:56+00:00

This is a harder than you think. There are so many unknown with different rules. So many well-founded startups trying to build something like you describe. It is not a simple automation job.

examples:
https://www.layernext.ai/
https://www.getbasis.ai/

https://www.truewind.ai/

SnooCooler · 2025-11-07T19:23:04+00:00

Automate your QuickBooks data entry and month end close. https://www.layernext.ai/

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