A droid that reconciles the ledger, chases the approvals and receipts, and flags the odd one out — so close starts clean and finishes early.
Month-end was a week-long grind. The team matched Stripe payouts to invoices by hand, reconciled bank feeds line by line, and spent days chasing managers for expense approvals and employees for missing receipts.
Close always slipped, and the controller ended up doing the real review work at 11pm — long after the easy 90% should have already been cleared.
Close doesn’t wait for someone to log in. On the morning of Day 1 the scheduled run fires, opens the period ledger in QuickBooks, and pulls the month’s Stripe payouts, fees and refunds — so everything that needs matching is in one place before the team’s had coffee.
The droid matches Stripe payouts and card lines straight against the ledger and auto-clears every clean one — 8,412 of 9,140 lines, 92%, with no human touch. What’s left isn’t busywork; it’s the handful of things that actually need a person.
The stragglers that usually eat days get handled in the background: it pings the controller in Slack for the card approvals, posts the yes’s straight to the ledger, kicks the wrong charge back to recode, and emails employees for the receipts still missing.
Then the judgment calls. A double-posted $4,200 vendor bill and a mis-coded charge get caught, and rather than auto-fixing, the droid queues them for review with the source docs attached — so the controller sees the exception and the evidence, not just a row number.
Finally it prepares the recurring accruals and journal entries and hands over a one-screen close summary. The controller clears three exceptions and posts — a day and a half in, instead of a week of late nights.
By the time I sit down for close, the easy 90% is already done and all that’s left is the handful of things that actually need my judgment. We post in a day and a half now.
Figures shared with permission; some operational details anonymised at the customer’s request.
Copy the brief below and paste it to your droid. It’ll walk you through the prerequisites, connect what it needs, and stand the workflow up with you.
I'm the controller on a small B2B SaaS finance team, and month-end close eats a week — matching Stripe payouts to invoices by hand, reconciling line by line, chasing managers for approvals and employees for receipts. The real review work doesn't start until late, after the easy 90% should already be cleared. Run month-end close. Apps/channels: QuickBooks (ledger), Stripe (payouts, fees, refunds), Slack (chasing approvals), email (chasing receipts). Kick off on the morning of the first business day of each month. Each run: 1. Open the period ledger in QuickBooks and pull the month's Stripe payouts, fees and refunds. 2. Match against the ledger and auto-clear the lines that cleanly reconcile. 3. Chase the rest — Slack managers for approvals, email employees for receipts, follow up until they're in, and recode anything miscoded. 4. Flag exceptions (duplicate bills, unusual amounts, wrong GL codes) and queue them for me with source docs attached. 5. Draft the recurring accruals and journal entries, then hand me a one-screen close summary to review and post. Only the exceptions should reach me; clear the clean 90% yourself.
Tell us the job that never gets done before close. We'll wire up a droid on a call and you can watch it work.
