AI bookkeeper

An AI bookkeeper is an agent that does the recurring accounts admin most small businesses fall behind on: matching bank transactions against invoices and bills, raising and chasing recurring invoices, keeping the ledger in Xero, Sage or QuickBooks tidy, and flagging anything it isn't confident about rather than guessing. It suits any business whose books are a week, or a quarter, behind where they should be, and where the actual work is repetitive rather than judgement-heavy.

Most agencies selling AI bookkeeping have never run a set of books with one. Replican has. We built and run our own accounts and invoicing system in-house: the one we use to raise our own invoices, reconcile our own bank feed and manage our own recurring billing, daily, not as a demo. It handles automated bank-transaction matching, recurring invoicing and reconciliation for our own business. We're not going to attach a number to what it's saved us, because we don't publish invented metrics, and because "it works for us" isn't proof it fits your books. But we do understand, from actually operating one of these systems ourselves, exactly where the matching logic gets confident and exactly where it should stop and ask. Plenty of agencies describe this role in the abstract. We've sat with the edge cases: the transaction that could be two different things, the invoice a client half-paid, the recurring charge that changed amount without warning.

The role covers the recurring mechanics of bookkeeping, not the judgement calls that belong to an accountant.

• 01Bank transaction matching. Pulls the daily bank feed in Xero, Sage or QuickBooks and matches each transaction against open invoices and bills by amount, date and payer, reconciling the clean matches automatically.
• 02Recurring invoicing. Generates and sends recurring invoices on schedule (monthly retainers, subscription charges, repeat service billing) with the correct line items, VAT treatment and payment terms already applied.
• 03Payment chasing. Sends reminder emails for overdue invoices on a defined schedule (a friendly nudge at seven days, a firmer one at thirty), and stops the sequence the moment a payment lands.
• 04Expense categorisation. Reads receipts and bills as they come in, assigns them to the right expense category and cost centre based on past patterns, and attaches supporting documents to the ledger entry.
• 05Bank reconciliation. Reconciles the bank account against the ledger weekly, flagging any discrepancy (a transaction with no obvious match, a duplicate, a bank fee that hasn't been recorded) for a human to resolve.
• 06VAT and reporting prep. Pulls together the transaction detail needed for a VAT return or a management report, formatted and ready for your accountant to review, not filed on its own authority.
• 07Petty cash and mileage logging. Where these are tracked digitally, logs and categorises entries against policy, flagging anything outside the usual pattern.

The morning starts with the overnight bank feed: forty-one transactions came in since yesterday. Thirty-six match cleanly against open invoices or recurring bills by amount and payer reference, and the agent reconciles them without a second thought. Three are close matches with a small discrepancy (one payment came in a few euro short of the invoice total) so it holds those, tags the discrepancy, and moves on rather than reconciling something that doesn't quite balance.

Mid-morning, it's the first working day of the month, so recurring invoices go out: eleven retainer invoices generated from the templates on file, each checked against the client's current agreed terms before sending, not just copied from last month. One client's retainer changed two weeks ago after a call that hasn't yet been reflected in the system; the agent has no record of that change, so it sends the old amount and flags the invoice for review rather than silently adjusting a number it was never told to adjust.

Early afternoon, the agent works through the payment-chasing queue. Two invoices crossed the seven-day mark and get a routine reminder. One crossed thirty days with no response to two previous reminders. The agent stops the automated sequence there, because a third automated chase to a client who's gone quiet is a relationship decision, not an admin one, and flags it for you to call.

Later, it works through the receipts inbox: nine expense receipts forwarded by staff over the past two days, each categorised against the chart of accounts based on the vendor and past pattern. One receipt is for a vendor it hasn't seen before, for an amount well outside the usual range for that category. It categorises it to the closest match, flags the uncertainty clearly, and moves on rather than either guessing silently or stopping the whole queue over one item.

Late in the day, it runs the weekly reconciliation. The bank balance and the ledger balance don't quite agree: a bank fee posted three days ago was never recorded. It logs the fee, matches it, and closes out the day with a short note on what it did and the four items still waiting on you.