How it works
Books that are kept, not caught up.
The work of bookkeeping is not entering transactions. It is deciding what a hundred ambiguous lines mean, and then proving the result is complete. Ezra does the first part continuously, asks you only about the lines that genuinely need a person, and proves the second part against your own statements.
Getting money in
Two ways in, and a rule about where it lands. Neither way is a commitment: an account can be connected later, or never.
- Connect a bank or a card
- Bank connections run through Plaid, in production, including the redirect to your own bank sign-in page that Wells Fargo, Chase and Capital One require and back again. Ezra asks for transactions only, and only for the account types it can keep books from: checking, savings, money market and credit cards. A brokerage or a mortgage account is not offered, because connecting one and finding it does nothing is worse than not being asked.
- Or upload statements
- Statement PDFs from Wells Fargo, Citi, American Express and Apple Card are read directly, as are the CSV and Numbers activity exports banks hand out, up to 25 MB a file. Either path works on its own and neither is required to start. A file Books cannot read is kept and the answer says why.
- The account sorts itself
- Ezra places a connected account on the right set of books from what the bank itself says about it, and shows the reason with the answer. An account nothing points at comes back unassigned rather than landing wherever you happened to be looking, and an unassigned account contributes no lines until a person says where it goes. How that decision is made.
What happens then
Three stages, and the order matters: nothing is categorized into a figure anyone will rely on until the document behind it has been checked.
1
Ezra checks every statement
Ezra adds up the lines it read and sets them against the totals the statement printed. One that does not tie is kept, flagged, and its lines are marked, rather than being averaged into the figures beside it.
2
Then Ezra keeps the books
Merchants are canonicalized and categorized, charges that repeat are recognized with their cadence, and the things that look wrong are raised: duplicates on the same day, card fees, interest, an overdraft, a run of reversed charges.
3
What is left is a short queue
The lines nothing can settle without you become plain questions with options. Ezra asks one per merchant, not one per line, and remembers an answer as a rule, so the same question is not asked again next month.
The questions only you can answer
A bank feed cannot tell whether a hardware store run was for a rental you own or for your own kitchen. Nothing can, except you. So Ezra asks, in plain language, one question at a time.
Larkspur Title Co
Jun 12 · looks like the closing at 12 Larkspur Lane
This lands within a percent of the amount you recorded for that closing, three days after the closing date. It is the only open closing it could be.
- Is this personal or business
- Asked once per merchant, covering every flagged line from that merchant on those books, and answerable for all of them at once or expanded line by line if they differ. Answering can move where a line is reported, which is the only thing in the queue that does.
- Who was this check to
- A check with no payee yet, so it can be categorized and so a 1099 candidate is not missed.
- Was this money you put in
- A deposit that is not revenue: an owner contribution, or a loan repayment. Booking these as income is one of the most common ways a set of books ends up overstating a year.
- How does this loan payment split
- Principal and interest, kept apart, because only one of them is an expense.
- Is this deposit the closing you are waiting on
- A deposit ranked against the closings you recorded as expected, matched by amount and date. Confirming the match books it as commission revenue and marks the closing paid.
- What is this
- A line nothing could place. It sits in Other until you say, and then it never does again.
A question you skip comes back in a month. A question you settle permanently does not come back at all. Answering the same thing twice is a no-op rather than a second ruling, and every answer is scoped to your account and one set of books, so a decision you make can never settle a question on somebody else’s books that happens to look identical.
It knows a commission is coming
This is the part a general-purpose bookkeeper cannot do, because a general-purpose bookkeeper has never heard of a closing.
Record the closings you expect to be paid for: the address, the closing date, the amount and who is paying. When a deposit lands, Ezra ranks the open closings it could be, by amount and by date, and offers you the match. Confirming it books the deposit as commission revenue, marks the closing paid, and ties the two together so the deposit is never separately guessed at later.
Releasing a match gives back exactly what the match changed and nothing else. A deposit matched by mistake does not leave a residue behind it.
Ask Ezra
The same bookkeeper, in a chat that reads your own books. Not a search over help articles, and not a general assistant that has been told about accounting.
Ezra answers from your ledger, and can act on it: categorize a line, write a rule so the same merchant is handled the same way from now on, or keep a note. It is scoped to one account and one set of books at a time, so a question asked on your business books cannot reach your personal ones, and nothing an account holds can reach another account.
Only the slice of the ledger a question needs leaves the machine. The ledger itself stays where it is.
Ezra is a bookkeeper, not a CPA, and it is instructed never to call itself one. When a question turns on tax law it gives the general rule and points you at what to ask your accountant. A line marked business or personal is a hint for that accountant, not a determination, and Ezra says so plainly.
And then a package
The output is not a dashboard. A dashboard is for you; the deliverable is for the person who files the return.
At the end of a year, Ezra builds a package for your accountant: a categorized ledger, a profit and loss summary by month, vendors, owner transfers, loans and interest, the questions still open, the write-offs you added by hand, the statement-by-statement reconciliation, and a cover memo. File by file, this is what is in it.
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.