Bookkeep, the “smarter” accounting automation platform, announced a $6.6 million seed+ round of funding led by Fin Capital, “with participation from existing investors TTV Capital, Argonautic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Haymaker Ventures, and others.”
This investment round brings Bookkeep’s total funding “to $10 million, following a $3.3 million seed round in 2021 led by Lerer Hippeau.”
The new financing will “support product innovation to help accountants and enterprises of all sizes scale their operations through automation.” The capital will also “help Bookkeep maximize the impact of its new AI technology that processes sales reports from any legacy data format like PDF, CSV, or Excel.”
Accountants, still today, “download these reports and manually enter the data from smaller ecommerce platforms, vertically specialized point of sale (POS), and other payment and sales systems.”
Bookkeep claims it is “the preferred accounting automation platform for more than 850 small and mid-market brands totaling billions in annualized revenue.” Its technology “enables professional accountants and bookkeepers to generate accrual-based sales accounting entries and reconcile payment deposits automatically.”
The platform “integrates with more than 30 sales, ecommerce, and payment channels such as PayPal, Shopify, and Amazon Seller, posting daily financials from these channels into accounting systems like QuickBooks and Xero.” Professionals who use the Bookkeep platform reportedly “save 20 hours per month, per client, and have seen a 20% improvement in the quality of data being captured.”
Companies spend “a significant amount of money— $53 billion annually— on outsourced manual accounting, based on market research by Paradoxes Inc.” A majority of finance and accounting professionals are “using a cloud-based or hybrid accounting process, but this hasn’t always solved the problem.” An alarming 93% of accountants “say they are still under pressure to close the books faster, according to Sage.”
The challenges accountants face today “include high transaction volumes, multiple ecommerce and sales platforms, and inconsistent financial data standards for reporting.”
Plus, the strained labor market “has made it increasingly difficult to find talent willing to do the manual work required.” The number of people sitting the CPA exam “has dropped by approximately 30%, a decade low that some regulators on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have called a ‘crisis.’”
Bookkeep’s automation platform “aims to solve both sides of this marketplace problem by providing accountants with a simple process to easily access and post data from siloed sales platforms into their accounting systems, while in the long term helping app developers understand how to build new platforms that deliver financial information in the right format that accountants need.”
While some software companies offer API access, many don’t have the infrastructure or deny access “including some of the most popular platforms like UberEats.”
As a result, accountants are “stuck manually downloading reports, running pivot tables in spreadsheets and manually creating proper accounting entries in their systems.”
Bookkeep’s AI platform “removes this manual data entry and enables accountants to easily turn payment details reports from older POS and smaller ecommerce systems into daily accounting entries into their accounting platforms that match payment deposits automatically.”
Jason Richelson, CEO & Co-Founder, Bookkeep, said:
“This additional capital underscores the difficult problems that still need to be solved in the underserved accounting industry. We’re at a massive inflection point where it is increasingly challenging to find accountants who are willing to do the manual work and those who are remaining in the profession are becoming burned out by the tedious, time-consuming tasks. These problems we face are entirely solvable through automation and we remain focused on creating technology and new ways of working that eliminate manual data entry for every bookkeeper.”