Do I need bookkeeping software if I have an accountant?

Usually not, and the question is worth taking seriously rather than answering with a sales pitch, because the reason people ask it is normally that something in the monthly routine is painful and it is not obvious what would fix it.

It depends on which of three situations you are in, and they need completely different things.

One: you do your own books

No accountant, or one who only appears at the year end. You do the double entry, you file the VAT return, you produce the accounts.

You want bookkeeping software, and the category is mature and good. This is what Xero, QuickBooks, Fortnox, Procountor and their equivalents are for, and nothing on this page is an argument against any of them.

Two: your accountant does everything

Some firms take a bank feed, collect the documents themselves, and come back to you only when something needs a decision. If that is your arrangement, you are already done, and there is nothing here for you to buy. It is worth knowing this arrangement exists, because people who have it are often surprised that anybody else's month looks different.

Three: an accountant does the books, and you do the gathering

This is where most owners of small companies actually are. The accountant has the software, your ledger lives in it, and the returns come out of it. What is left for you is everything that has to happen before they can start: downloading a statement for each account and card, finding the invoices you sent, and hunting a document for every payment across your email, a handful of supplier billing portals, and your camera roll.

Bookkeeping software does not do this part, which is the thing that surprises people. Buying a subscription to it gives you somewhere to put the material once you have collected it, and collecting it was the work. If you are in this situation and you buy Xero hoping the monthly evening goes away, it will not.

What actually helps is one of three things: your accountant taking on the collection as well, which some firms will do for a fee worth asking about; a change to how documents arrive, so that fewer of them need hunting; or something that does the gathering for you. The handover checklist and the receipts guide are worth reading whichever of those you pick.

Prep is not bookkeeping, and the words get used interchangeably

Bookkeeping is recording each transaction in the right account, reconciling it, and producing the accounts and the returns. That is a trained job with rules behind it, and it is what your accountant is for.

Prep is what has to be true before any of that can begin. The statements exist, every payment has a document behind it, and somebody has decided whether the lunch was a client meeting. None of it requires training, all of it requires access to your accounts and your memory of the month, and that is exactly why it falls to you rather than to the accountant.

Where Clerk.AI fits

Clerk.AI is a prep tool, so it is only for the third situation. It signs into the banks and the billing portals on your Mac, hunts the matching receipts through your email, works down the statement line by line, and asks you about the handful of things it cannot settle. Your accountant gets a folder and a drafted email, in whatever software they already use, and nothing changes for them.

If you are in the first situation, go and buy bookkeeping software. If you are in the second, enjoy it.

If the gathering is the part that hurts

It does the collecting for you.

Runs on your Mac. Pay what you decide, including nothing.

Apple Silicon or Intel · macOS 14+ · v0.4.0