What AI does and does not do in your books
Where AI helps a software company's bookkeeping in Achekam, reading statements and supplier invoices, and the approvals that always stay with a person.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Software founders tend to assume the books can run themselves. The product is automated, deployments are automated, so surely a model can read the bank statement, sort the cloud bills and close the month while the team ships features.
Part of that is true. In Achekam, AI does real work on the most tedious parts of bookkeeping: reading statements and turning a pile of supplier invoices and receipts into proposed entries. But nothing reaches your ledger on a model's say-so. This article explains exactly where the line sits, so you can decide how much to lean on it and who in the company carries the approvals.
Reading scanned bank statements: every amount must appear on the page
Bank statements come in as PDF, CSV, Excel, OFX, QIF, MT940 or CAMT.053 files. Every import is checked so that the opening balance plus the movements equals the closing balance, whatever format it arrived in.
Most statements are machine-readable and need no AI at all. The help comes with the awkward ones: a scanned statement from a bank that only sends images, or a PDF layout the importer does not recognise. Where the workspace has a model configured, it can read those, with a strict condition attached: every amount it reads must appear on the page. The same balance check then applies as for any other import, so a statement that does not add up does not go in.
For a start-up with a business account, a card account and perhaps a dollar account for overseas customers, that matters. The statements that cause the most retyping are exactly the odd-format ones.
Supplier invoices and receipts read into suggestions
The second job is the paperwork behind your costs. A software company collects receipts from hosting providers, design tools, recruitment platforms, co-working spaces and conference tickets. Uploaded to Financial Intake, each supplier invoice or receipt is read into its fields and becomes a suggested posting, with a journal proposed for it.
Two limits are worth knowing. VAT that is not printed on the document stays empty rather than being guessed, which matters for overseas tool receipts that show no VAT at all. And a low-confidence field or a possible duplicate is not quietly accepted: it waits in the Intake Review Queue for someone to look at it.
Scans need a reading service or an image-reading key
Text-based PDFs can be read directly. Scans and photos, such as a phone picture of a taxi slip, can be read only when an outside OCR service or an image-reading AI key has been set up for the workspace. Without one, the upload is not silently dropped: a review item called OCR_ENGINE_NOT_CONFIGURED is raised so a person knows it needs attention.
If your team photographs receipts, settle this when you set the workspace up rather than after a month of uploads has piled up in the review queue.
Bank matches and journals that a person accepts
On the banking side, statement lines are matched to entries already in your books by suggestion, and a person accepts each match. A line that is not yet in the books, say a monthly card charge for a monitoring tool, becomes a suggested journal that a person approves before it posts.
The reconciliation itself completes only when nothing is left unexplained: either the difference is nil, or every leftover line carries an explanation. Suggestions speed up the matching; the decisions stay with whoever accepts each match.
Underneath all of this sits one rule. Journals proposed from documents, bank lines or adjustments are only candidates, waiting under Financial Intake in Posting Candidates. Only a person can approve one and post it, and AI is refused both steps. Keeping a person between a suggestion and the ledger is an internal control in the ordinary accounting sense; ACCA's overview of internal controls explains the types of control and why duties are separated.
Suggested journals, not bills on the Bills list
One consequence surprises people. An uploaded supplier invoice becomes a journal suggestion, not a bill on the Bills list waiting to be paid. If you want the invoice in accounts payable, with an approval step and a record of part payments, you record it as a supplier bill yourself; a bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts and can then be paid in full or in parts from a chosen bank account.
In practice, a software company tends to split its costs:
| Kind of cost | Usual route |
|---|---|
| Card charges for tools and hosting, already paid | Intake suggestion or bank-line journal, approved by a person |
| Contractor and agency invoices you pay on terms | Supplier bill, approved and paid from the Bills list |
| Receipts for team expenses | Intake suggestion, checked against the card statement |
Carrier invoices turned into suggested postings shows the same intake flow in a different industry.
Seeing every AI request, and switching AI off
Investors, auditors and your own engineers will ask what the model saw. The AI Activity Log lists every AI request with the vendor, the model, the tokens used and an estimated cost; the costs are estimates from vendor list prices, not an invoice. A workspace administrator can switch AI off for the whole workspace at any time, and the imports, matching and approvals carry on by hand.
That makes AI a choice rather than a dependency. You might keep it on for the odd-format statements and receipts, or switch it off for a period when an investor or auditor asks for every entry to be keyed by a person.
For the wider picture of what Achekam's AI is allowed to see, read what Achekam's AI can see and do. For the import side in detail, see bank feeds and statement imports.
Who approves, in a small team
Write down, before the first month-end, who approves suggested postings and who completes reconciliations. In a team of five, that may be the finance lead approving and a founder reviewing the closed month. Then let the models do the reading, and keep the decisions with the people whose names are on the accounts.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
