- Small businesses already on Xero ($300k–$10m revenue)
- Businesses with a part-time bookkeeper who you want to keep
- Businesses spending 3+ hours/month chasing categorisation
- Businesses paying $400+ a month in bookkeeping fees
- Owner-operators doing their own Xero who want to keep doing it but faster
AI Bookkeeping Assist is a Xero-integrated AI agent that categorises your transactions, drafts monthly close prep, sanity-checks your BAS before lodgement, and delivers a plain-English financial digest each month. It works alongside your existing bookkeeper, most clients see bookkeeping hours drop 40–60%. Never lodges anything; lodgement stays with your registered BAS agent. $1,500 AUD setup, $399 AUD/month.
What this is, and what this isn’t
This is not a replacement for a registered BAS agent or tax agent. The agent doesn’t lodge anything with the ATO. It doesn’t sign off on your accounts. It doesn’t provide tax advice. Those are regulated activities and we’re not going anywhere near them.
What it does do: the tedious, error-prone, time-burning categorisation and pre-close work that currently eats your bookkeeper’s monthly hours. We give the AI a constrained role with deliberate guardrails, categorise, flag, suggest, sanity-check. The human professional still owns the lodgement, the sign-off, the year-end coordination with the accountant.
The numbers we’ve seen
Across clients running this for 3+ months:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper hours per month | 12–18 | 5–8 |
| Average bookkeeping fee per month | $720–$1,080 | $300–$480 |
| Transactions needing human categorisation each month | 100% | 8–15% |
| BAS lodgement errors caught before submission | 0–1/year | 2–4/quarter (caught + fixed) |
| Owner time spent reviewing Xero | 3–4 hours/month | 30 minutes/month |
Two important caveats. First, those numbers are for businesses with cleanish Xero accounts going in. If your Xero is a mess, the first three months are about getting it clean, the gains come later. Second, the bookkeeper-hour reduction is a feature, not a bug; your bookkeeper should be doing the high-value work (compliance, payroll, advisory), not coding line items.
The pre-close monthly pass
This is the bit clients love most. On the last business day of each month, the agent runs a pre-close pass:
- All un-categorised transactions surfaced + suggested codes
- Bank reconciliation status checked
- GST treatment flagged on anything unusual (overseas purchases, capital items, mixed-use)
- Suspense + uncategorised income flagged with context
- Variance vs prior month on every major P&L line
- Suspect duplicates flagged
- Debtors over 60 days surfaced
- Cash position vs same time last month
That goes to your bookkeeper as a starting point for the close. They review, action what they want, ignore what they don’t. We’ve found this halves the bookkeeper’s monthly close time on average.
The BAS sanity check
Once a quarter, before the BAS goes to lodgement, the agent does a separate pass. It compares this quarter’s BAS draft against the prior 4 quarters. It flags anything that looks anomalous:
- GST owed is 40% higher than usual, is that real?
- PAYG instalment is well above the prior pattern, has revenue jumped?
- A specific income account has 3× last quarter’s revenue, is it a one-off?
- A new supplier is showing 100% GST coded but the supplier name suggests it might be GST-free?
The point isn’t to catch tax fraud (that’s not what BAS sanity-checking is for). The point is to catch the obvious data-entry mistakes BEFORE you lodge them with the ATO. That’s where almost every BAS amendment comes from.
Trust + accuracy: the hallucination problem in financial data
Generative AI making up financial numbers would be the worst-case for this kind of product. Two design choices make that effectively zero risk.
First, the agent never invents numbers, it only reads transactions from Xero and proposes categorisations. The actual numerical values are passed through verbatim. We use structured outputs so every suggestion has a defined JSON shape that gets validated before reaching your bookkeeper.
Second, the agent is constrained to a small action vocabulary: suggest a code, flag an anomaly, draft a summary. It can’t post journal entries directly. It can’t modify reconciliations. It can’t change a transaction date. Every change to Xero is made by a human, by hand. The agent is a research assistant, not a finance officer.
Voice + style
The monthly digest is written in plain English at owner-operator level. No accounting jargon unless your accountant has briefed us to use specific terms. “You spent 18% more on stock this month than last month, and revenue went up 11%, your gross margin tightened by about 4 points”, that level. Most owners read it in two minutes and ask their bookkeeper one or two follow-up questions instead of staring at a P&L.
Build timeline
| Week | What we do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Kick-off + Xero read-only access. We pull 6 months of categorised data for tuning. |
| 2 | Build the agent. First categorisation pass against last month, your bookkeeper reviews accuracy. |
| 3 | Wire up daily Xero pull. Soft-launch with one pre-close pass. |
| 4 | Tune false positives. First full month live. By end of month it’s stable. |
What’s in the $399 AUD/month
- API costs, Xero data + Claude categorisation. Typical SMB hits ~$10/month in API.
- Daily Xero pull, agent reads new transactions every day, queues suggestions for your bookkeeper.
- Monthly pre-close pass, automated, delivered first business day of new month.
- Quarterly BAS sanity check, automated, delivered before lodgement.
- Monthly plain-English digest, to your inbox or Slack.
- Tuning, accuracy tuning as your business changes (new suppliers, new product lines, new revenue streams).
Best for
- Australian SMBs on Xero, $300k–$10m revenue.
- Businesses already paying $400+/month for bookkeeping.
- Owners who want to spend less time in Xero, not more.
- Bookkeepers who want their hours doing high-value work, not coding line items.
Below $300k revenue, Xero on its own + a quarterly accountant review is enough. Above $10m, you probably need a full accounting stack (we’d point you at a CFO+advisory firm, not a productised AI service).
Pricing in plain English
- $1,500 AUD setup, one-off, kick-off, tuning month, integration, first close pass.
- $399 AUD/month, ongoing, daily pull, monthly close prep, quarterly BAS sanity check, monthly digest. Cancel any time.
GST added at invoicing. No lock-in.