Buddhika and Kelum here. We built an AI bookkeeper and CFO because we couldn't afford to close our own books.
Six months ago, we were building financial intelligence for enterprise CFOs. We'd spend months getting access to their SAP or Oracle systems, then more weeks understanding data models that no one documented. After 18 months and a handful of customers, we couldn't make it work reliably. The integration complexity was killing us.
The breaking point came when we realized we hadn't closed our own books for the last full year. Our accountant was chasing us as he needed to file year-end. We use QuickBooks just to invoice customers, never record any expenses or reconcile a bank statement.
So we pivoted and started building a full end-to-end bookkeeping and financial intelligence platform for startups and small businesses. The good thing is at least we can eat our own dogfood and iterate.
Initially we thought it was a super easy problem to solve. Also as engineers we thought this was not complex or sexy enough for us to even work on. But the technical problem was harder than expected. Bank transactions are a mess, "CL GRP INSURED INS" could be what? There are so many edge cases and they're different business to business.
The reconciliation part for expenses was surprisingly straightforward, matching transactions by amount, date and description within a 3-5 day window, flag exceptions. The hard part is handling edge cases like income recognition, refunds, split payments, bulk payments and foreign currency.
What we have now:
- Automatic transaction categorization (QuickBooks integration)
- Email parsing for invoices and receipts
- Real-time cashflow, burn rate P&L that updates as transactions come in
- Month-end close that actually... closes
What we haven't figured out:
- Multi-entity companies (parent/subsidiary structures)
- Handling equity compensation properly
- International tax complexity
- Many more unknow edge cases.
We're looking for 100 founding users who are willing to connect their QuickBooks accounts and try it out. If you're a technical founder doing your own books, I'd genuinely love feedback on what's hardest for you.
Early access: https://www.layernext.ai/
