Can an agent do bookkeeping?
Mostly. Bookkeeping is pattern-matching against rules you have already decided, which is exactly what agents are good at. An agent keeps the books daily and hands you an exceptions list. You review that list, not the ledger.
- Hours back per week
- 11
- Human cost
- €900–2,500/mo for a bookkeeper
- Agent cost
- €30–80/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Daily transaction coding
YESThe core loop. Bank feed in, coded ledger out, with a note on anything unusual.
Receipt and invoice matching
YESReads the PDF, extracts the numbers, attaches it to the right ledger line without a template.
Supplier statement reconciliation
YESCompares their statement to your ledger and produces the difference list, which is the whole job.
VAT or sales tax return prep
MOSTLYAssembles the return and shows its working. Submission stays a deliberate human action.
Payroll journals
MOSTLYPosts them correctly from the payroll report. Worth a look each month because the cost of a wrong one is high.
Deciding your chart of accounts
HALFIt will propose a sensible one. How you want to see your business is a decision you should make.
3/6 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Submitting the VAT return
- The chart of accounts as a reflection of how you run the business
- Anything involving a person who is upset about money
How this goes wrong
The agent codes a recurring supplier correctly for eleven months, then the supplier changes their invoice format and it silently starts coding to the wrong account. Without an exceptions review you find out in the annual report.
What it needs access to
- Xero, QuickBooks or Moneybird
- Bank feed
- Email inbox
- Receipt storage
- Payroll system
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my bookkeeper. Daily: pull transactions from my bank feed and payment processors, code them against my chart of accounts, and match receipts from my inbox and Drive folder to the right lines. Reconcile supplier statements when they arrive. Anything ambiguous goes to an exceptions list with your best guess and your reasoning — never silently guess. Weekly, send me the exceptions list and a one-paragraph summary of what changed. Monthly, prepare the VAT return with your working shown, but do not submit it. You have write access to the ledger only. You cannot initiate a payment.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between agent bookkeeping and the automation my accounting software already has?
Rule-based automation fires when a transaction matches a pattern you wrote in advance. An agent reads the actual invoice, notices that this supplier renamed themselves, checks the contract in your Drive, and codes it correctly anyway. The difference shows up entirely in the exceptions.
Do I still need a bookkeeper?
Most small businesses stop needing a monthly bookkeeper and start needing a quarterly reviewer. That is a real cost reduction, but the review is not optional — it is the control that makes the automation safe.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Xero, QuickBooks or Moneybird and Bank feed, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a bookkeeping agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.