Ezra keeps your books as the year goes.
Ezra is an AI bookkeeper for small businesses and the self-employed, and Books is what Ezra keeps. Ezra reads your bank and card activity, keeps categorized books all year, reconciles them against your own statements, and hands your accountant a clean package at the end of it.
Ezra is a bookkeeper, not a CPA. A CPA is the licensed accountant who receives the package and signs the return. Everything Ezra does is aimed at making that person’s job short.
Start here: Ezra reconciles
A bank feed is easy to trust and hard to check. It can drop a line, hand you a pending charge that later settles at a different amount, or go quiet and catch up without saying it did. None of that announces itself, and a profit and loss summary built on it looks exactly like one that is right.
Ezra checks every statement against the totals printed on that statement. On a checking statement that means deposits, withdrawals, and the roll: the opening balance less the net of every line has to arrive at the printed closing balance. On a card statement it is the summary box line by line, purchases and payments and credits and fees and interest, each against what the issuer printed for it.
A statement that does not tie is kept, flagged, and its lines are marked, rather than being quietly folded into the figures beside it. That is the difference between a number and a guess, and it is the reason the rest of this page is worth reading. Why that matters in November.
How it works
1
Connect an account, or upload statements
Ezra reads bank and card activity through a connection you authorize, and reads the statements you upload. Either works on its own. Neither is required to try it.
2
Ezra keeps the books, you answer what only you can
Categories, recurring charges, duplicates and the things that look wrong. What is left is a short queue of decisions that need a person, and Ezra asks one question per merchant at a time.
3
Your accountant gets a package, not a shoebox
Ezra hands over a categorized ledger, profit and loss by month, the write-offs you added by hand, the questions still open, and the proof that every statement ties to its own printed totals.
What Ezra does differently
Four things, each with a page behind it, and none of them a claim about being first at anything.
- Ezra reconciles instead of trusting the feed
- A bank feed is a stream of lines a bank chose to send, and nothing in it says the stream was complete. Ezra adds up what it read and sets it against the totals the statement printed. A month that does not tie is kept and explained, never averaged over. Read how
- Ezra knows a commission is coming
- Record the closings you are waiting on, with the address, the date and the amount. When a deposit lands, Ezra ranks the closings it could be and offers the match, then books it as commission revenue and marks the closing paid. Read how
- Ezra keeps your books apart, properly
- As many sets of books as you have, never summed, with exactly one of them reporting any given dollar. A business expense you paid personally stays banked where it was paid and is reported where it belongs, in the same instant, in every figure. Read how
- Ezra audits QuickBooks rather than adding to it
- Built to pull down what QuickBooks already holds and set it against a reconciled ledger: owner money booked as income, card payments double counted, entries with nothing behind them on any statement. Built and tested, and not connectable yet, because Intuit app review has not started. Read how
What you get at tax time
If your current system is a folder of statements and a hopeful email in March, this is the part that matters.
- A categorized ledger
- Every line the books report for the year, with the account, the merchant, the category and which set of books actually paid it.
- Profit and loss by month
- Income, every expense category, total expenses and net, month by month.
- Vendors, with 1099 candidates flagged
- Who you paid and how much, with the vendors you paid 600 dollars or more by bank transfer or check marked for your accountant to rule on.
- The write-offs you entered
- Mileage priced per trip, the home office by the simplified method, cash, and anything paid from an account Books cannot see. On their own schedule, with their own totals.
- What is still open
- The lines nobody settled, each with the reason. A package that hides what it could not decide has moved the problem to April.
- The reconciliation
- Every statement covering the year, its period, whether it tied, and the checks themselves. This is the answer to the only hard question an accountant asks about books they did not keep.
What Ezra will not do
The limits are on the front page rather than in a footnote, because they are the reason to trust the rest.
- Ezra never moves money
- Ezra reads. Books holds no payment credentials and cannot make a transfer, a payment or a transaction on any account you connect, including if you asked it to.
- Personal and business are never added together
- There is no combined total anywhere in this product. A figure that adds your personal life to your business is not what you file, not what you owe and not what the business earned. It exists only because it is easy to compute, so it is not computed.
- Two kinds of number, never mixed
- Figures that reconcile to a statement are one thing. Mileage, home office, cash and anything paid from an account Books cannot see are another. Ezra never adds one kind to the other: both reach your accountant, totaled separately, each marked for what it is.
- Ezra never says what is deductible
- Ezra records what you assert, does the arithmetic, and flags what an accountant will ask for. What is deductible is a licensed judgment, and it stays with the licensed person who makes it.
Who it is for
Small business owners and the self-employed, with particular attention to real estate agents, brokers and 1099 contractors, whose income arrives in lumps months after the work.
If you pay a bookkeeper today, Ezra does the part that is mechanical and asks you only about the part that is not. If you hand a folder to an accountant once a year, Ezra collects the answers while you still remember them. And what Ezra does not do.
Start with one statement.
Create an account and upload a single month. You will see whether it reconciles before you decide whether to connect anything.
Statement PDFs are read from American Express, Apple Card, Citi and Wells Fargo. From any other bank, the CSV or Numbers activity export works, and a PDF Books cannot read is kept and says so rather than being booked.