Who it is for
People whose books are only hard in the last week of the year.
Ezra is a bookkeeper for small business owners and the self-employed: people who today either pay for something a good bookkeeper does in a few hours a month, or hand a folder to an accountant in March and hope. It is built with particular attention to real estate agents and brokers, because the shape of that income breaks the assumptions general bookkeeping software is built on.
The four shapes this fits
Not four plans. Four situations, and Ezra does the same job in all of them.
- Real estate agents and brokers
- Income arrives in irregular lumps months after the work, expenses are personal until somebody decides they are not, and the year is decided by which deposits got matched to which closings. Ezra works in those terms: a closing is a thing you can record, and a deposit is matched to it rather than categorized at.
- 1099 contractors
- Nobody is withholding anything, mileage is real money, and the difference between a good January and a bad one is whether the evidence was collected while it was still obvious what it was.
- Small business owners with more than one thing
- A business, a second business, a rental, and a personal life, on some mixture of accounts nobody planned. Ezra keeps them as separate sets of books that are never added together.
- Anybody who hands over a shoebox once a year
- If your current system is a folder of statements and a hopeful email in March, the thing you are missing is not software with more charts. It is having the questions answered while you still remember the answers.
Why real estate is called out
To general bookkeeping software, a deposit of an odd amount from a title company is a line to ask you about. Every time.
Record the closings you are waiting on: the address, the closing date, the amount you expect and who is paying. When a deposit lands, Ezra ranks the open closings it could be, matching on amount within about a percent and on a closing date within ten days of the deposit, and offers you the match. Confirming it books the deposit as commission revenue and marks the closing paid.
That one behavior changes what the rest of the year looks like. Revenue is tied to the deal that produced it rather than being a deposit somebody categorized. And the expenses that came with that deal are sitting on the same set of books, categorized, because they were categorized in the month they happened. The rest of the mechanism.
What Ezra does not do
Worth knowing before you sign up rather than after.
- It does not run payroll
- There is no payroll in this product. Wages and payroll taxes appear the way any other bank line does.
- It does not send invoices
- Ezra reads what happened to your accounts. It does not bill anybody on your behalf.
- It does not file anything
- No returns, no 1099s, no extensions. It flags 1099 candidates for your accountant to rule on and stops there.
- It does not decide what is deductible
- It records what you assert, prices it, keeps it separate from everything that reconciles, and hands it over. The licensed judgment stays with the licensed person.
- It does not move money
- Ezra reads. Books holds no payment credentials and cannot make a payment, a transfer or a transaction on any account you connect, including on your instruction.
Ezra keeps books, and Ezra is a bookkeeper, not a CPA. Books is not a CPA firm and it does not give tax, legal or accounting advice. A CPA is the licensed accountant who receives the year-end package and decides what goes on a return, and the entire design of this product is aimed at making that person’s job short rather than at replacing them.
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.