Start here: AI Bookkeeper, books from your bank file that learn your business

Who AI Bookkeeper is for, what you get, your first ten minutes from a bank CSV to a profit and loss, and what it will not do for you.

Start here · 6 min read · Source
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If you run a small business and your "books" are a folder of bank statements you mean to deal with in April, this post is for you. It explains what AI Bookkeeper does, who gets the most from it, how to go from a bank file to a profit and loss in about ten minutes, and where it stops.

Who it is for

  • A sole trader or freelancer who pays for everything from one checking account and one credit card, and wants a real profit figure without a monthly subscription.
  • A seller on Etsy, eBay, Shopify, Stripe, Square, PayPal or Amazon whose deposits never match their sales, because the platform kept fees, refunds and shipping before paying out.
  • A tradesperson, cleaner, salon owner, trainer, driver or landlord who gets paid by Zelle, Venmo and card readers and has never been sure which lines are income and which are just money moving between their own accounts.
  • A club or PTO treasurer who has to show the committee where the money went.
  • Anyone who already uses QuickBooks or Xero, or has an accountant, and wants the sorting done before the file goes over.

The problem, in your words

"I have three hundred lines a month and half of them say something like POS DEBIT SQ *BLUE BOTTLE 9981." "Is my credit card payment an expense?" "My accountant charges me to categorise transactions I could have done if I knew how." "Every bookkeeping app wants my bank login."

The sorting is boring, the traps are quiet, and the usual fix costs a subscription and a bank connection you may not want to hand over.

What you get

Balanced books from the files your bank already gives you. You download a statement, the tool reads it, and every line gets a suggested account with a confidence and a short reason. Out the other end come a trial balance, a profit and loss by month, a balance sheet and close checks.

Less work every month. Each line you file teaches it. When you have filed the same payee the same way a few times, that payee's next line posts by itself. Lines it is unsure of wait in a review queue for you; nothing guessed by a model or a keyword list posts without you.

The traps handled. A card payment from checking is paired with the matching line on the card statement and booked as a transfer, not an expense. A payout from Stripe, PayPal or Amazon can be split into gross sales and fees. The books are reconciled against the running balance on your statement, or against a closing balance you type from a paper one.

A clean hand-off. Export a journal for QuickBooks Online, Xero, QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), a ledger/hledger journal or a plain journal CSV, so you or your accountant can carry on in the software you already use.

Files it reads. Bank and card CSV, Excel (.xlsx and .xls), OFX, QFX, QIF, MT940, BAI2, Spanish Norma 43, French CFONB 120, CAMT.053, a statement PDF that has a text layer, or the text copied out of one.

There is a lot more behind the "Optional" panels on the page (invoices and bills, loans, prepaid expenses, equipment and depreciation, stock you resell, payroll provider reports, a sales tax worksheet, US Schedule C and 1099-NEC worksheets). You do not need any of it to start.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Open the tool at https://marisstella.app/ai-bookkeeper/. There is no sign-up and no key to enter.
  2. Click Load the example (three synthetic months) to see a finished set of books for a made-up business before you touch your own. Look at the review queue and the reports, then start fresh with Start empty books under "6. Export and save".
  3. Download a month of transactions from your bank as CSV (or OFX, QFX, QIF; most banks offer one of these). In 1. Import a statement, say which account it is for, choose the file and press Import.
  4. Do the same for your credit card. Most card exports list charges as positive numbers, so tick Charges are positive in this file (most card exports). If your dates read 31/01/2026, tick Dates are day first.
  5. Go to 2. Review queue. Use Accept every suggestion at or above a confidence you are comfortable with, then work through the rest: pick the right account for each line, tick it, and press File the ticked lines. For a payout that is part sales and part fees, open Split on that line and type the parts, for example 4000:1000.00, 6010:-30.00.
  6. Read 4. Reports: profit and loss, balance sheet and the close checks. If a check fails, it tells you which lines to look at.
  7. In 6. Export and save, press Download the books file and keep it somewhere safe. If your accountant uses QuickBooks or Xero, download the matching journal from the same section.

Next month, import the new statements into the same books. The payees you filed before will start posting themselves.

How well does it learn?

The README measures this on a synthetic year for a made-up design studio, importing one month at a time and filing each month correctly: from the fourth month on, 1,300 of 2,164 lines posted by themselves and one of those went to the wrong account; 542 of 642 review suggestions were right. That data is synthetic, and the same author wrote the generator and the built-in keywords, so treat the numbers as a picture of how fast it picks up your own payees, not a promise about your bank. The README says so in as many words.

What it costs and where your data goes

It is free and MIT licensed. The page runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded: your books live in this browser's storage and in the JSON file you download. In Chrome, Edge or Opera you can use Open a books file and keep it saved to keep the books live in a file you pick, such as one in a synced folder.

The AI layer is off unless you turn it on. Under 3. Optional: ask an AI about the review queue you can add your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini key, or point it at a model running on your own computer (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp). If you use a hosted provider, the lines still in review (date, description, amount), your chart of accounts and up to 40 lines you already filed go to that provider under your key. With a local model they stay on your machine. Either way, the model only suggests; you still file.

The hosted page is best-effort with no uptime promise, so the downloaded books file is your copy of record, not the browser.

What it does not do

  • It is not accounting, tax or financial advice, and it does not replace an accountant. You are responsible for checking what it produces.
  • No bank feeds. You download statements and import them.
  • It keeps cash-basis books from bank lines, with invoices and bills as an option. Payroll runs from a provider's report can be booked, but it does no payroll filings, wage bases or state rules, and no sales tax filings.
  • A scanned, image-only statement PDF is not read; it needs OCR first.
  • Stock is single-location only.
  • The AI layer's accuracy has not been measured yet.

Where to go next

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