I built a tool to do my bookkeeping for me (freelancer)

I built a tool to do my bookkeeping for me (freelancer)(billpal.io)

2 points by romanleeb 242 days ago | 3 comments

romanleeb 242 days ago |

Hey HN,

I'm Roman and I've been working on Billpal, a tool I built to do my bookkeeping for me.

Started as a personal thing, but I ended up building a product around it so others can use it too.

I'm a freelancer myself and always had a strong dislike for accounting, so I started to automate things bit by bit.

After testing a lot of accounting tools, I realized that a) they have many features I don’t need, and b) I was still faster using a spreadsheet.

So I built this tool to focus only on the essentials: finding invoices in my inbox and matching them to bank transactions.

What it does:

- Imports bank transactions via Open Banking APIs

- Collect invoices from the user’s inbox

- Using an IDP/OCR provider for document extraction

- Extracts basic info like date, supplier name, and line items, as well as specifics like whether it's reverse charge or various tax rates (e.g. from restaurants)

- Matches invoices to expenses based on params like amount, currency (FX conversion), and similarity to supplier names / line items (that's the only agentic part)

- Can also handle credit card statements (this part still needs improvement though)

- Users can then export a CSV with matched records

- Also built a whatsapp bot to make it super simple for users to upload receipts (photo or pdf)

Currently supports banks in the EU and UK, but planning to add US banks down the line.

Focusing on expenses right now but will also add income shortly (outgoing invoices from sent emails).

I would love to get your feedback on it. Check it out here: https://billpal.io

Looking forward to your thoughts / suggestions,

Roman

jackkinsella 242 days ago | |

Cool software! Does this support the formats needed for German bookkeeping? Accounting fees are astronomical here so there is pent-up demand for a decent solution I reckon.

romanleeb 242 days ago | | |

Thank you! Well, I built it in a way that the format is kinda universal – expenses are categorized but not with tax codes. Instead I am using labels like e.g. 'Cloud Infra & Hosting'. Plus apart from the basic infos I even extract things like reverse charge y/n or validate VAT IDs to make it as easy as possible for my tax advisor.

So it will not file your taxes for you but it prepares the raw data for your tax guy in a way that they have minimal effort and you can save quite substantially on the bookkeeping part. I'm in Austria and it is a bit cheaper here but also quite costly. Now I only pay for the tax filing, annual accounts and consulting when I need it.