Bookkeeping services that keep your books current all year
Real double-entry books, not a spreadsheet with a nicer interface. Every posted entry is permanent and numbered, and a correction is a visible reversal plus a repost rather than a silent edit.
Serving Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and the rest of Canada and the US
AI Bookkeeping is a bookkeeping service for small businesses in Canada and the United States. You send receipts and invoices, AI prepares each accounting entry, deterministic rules validate it before it posts, and a human reviewer settles anything uncertain. Plans start at $99 CAD a month with a 15-day free trial and no credit card.
What makes this a real bookkeeping service and not a categorizing app
The difference between software that sorts receipts and a service that keeps books is what happens to an entry after it is created. Here is what happens to yours.
The ledger cannot be quietly edited
Every write goes through one posting engine. A posted entry is frozen. If something is wrong, the fix is a reversal and a repost, both numbered and both visible in the register. Most tools in this price range let you overwrite last quarter and leave no trace.
A person checks the judgment calls
The AI does the sorting. When it is not confident, the entry does not post: it goes to a review queue worked by a trained reviewer on our staff, who opens the source document and decides the treatment. You never see that queue, and you never approve categories yourself.
Real bank feeds, not CSV uploads
Bank and credit-card connections run through Plaid, so your banking credentials never reach us. Stripe transactions reconcile against the ledger. Reconciliation is part of the service rather than a monthly chore handed back to you.
Built with accounting-grade arithmetic
Money is decimal, never floating point, and a posting either completes in full or not at all. That sounds like an implementation detail until the month your totals are out by a cent and nobody can say why.
What professional bookkeeping services should include
Answer first: the whole bookkeeping cycle, monthly, without you touching a category. Documents in, validated double-entry records out, with reports and tax figures your accountant can work from directly.
Send the documents
Receipts, supplier bills and client invoices, from the web app or the Telegram bot.
The entry gets prepared
Extraction, then the accounting treatment, with sales tax separated from the expense.
Rules validate it
Deterministic checks, not a model. Anything that fails them does not post.
Human review if needed
A reviewer opens the source document and posts the right treatment through the same engine.
Books stay current
Statements, sales-tax figures, receivables and payables, maintained through the year.
Year-end starts from finished records
Invite them by email and they get their own access to the records and reports.
What is not included, stated plainly
We do not file your tax returns, and we do not give tax, legal or financial advice. We prepare and maintain the records and produce the reports behind a filing; the filing itself is yours or your accountant's. Payroll is not a product we sell today. Bank statement files are not a supported upload, because the platform works from receipts, invoices and connected bank transactions instead.
Do you need a bookkeeping firm, or software?
Answer first: if you want somebody accountable for the books being right, you want a service. If you are happy owning the categorizing and only want the typing reduced, software is cheaper and enough.
A traditional bookkeeping firm gives you a named person and charges for their hours. Software gives you a tool and leaves the judgment with you. This sits deliberately in between: the routine work is automated, and the judgment calls that would normally come back to you as a list of questions go to a reviewer on our staff instead. You get the accountability without paying hourly for data entry.
How to compare bookkeeping companies without a spreadsheet war
Answer first: ask three questions. Can a posted entry be edited without a trace? Who decides when the software is unsure? And what is the price when your document volume doubles?
Why those three questions, and what a good answer sounds like
Editing. If last quarter can be changed silently, your books are a document rather than a record, and your accountant cannot rely on anything they reconciled a month ago. Here, a correction is a reversal plus a repost, both numbered, both visible.
Uncertainty. Every tool in this category is confident most of the time. What matters is the other times. Some queue the item for you, which quietly makes you the bookkeeper again. We route it to our own reviewer.
Volume. Per-document pricing is where bookkeeping quotes get surprising. Our plans are named volumes at fixed monthly prices, listed in full below, so the bill moves when you change plan and not when you have a busy month.
Bookkeeping and accounting services: where we stop and your accountant starts
Answer first: we keep the books through the year. Your accountant does year-end, adjusting entries and tax. Nothing here replaces them, and the service is more useful when you have one.
The common failure is not that an accountant is missing. It is that they meet the year's records for the first time in the spring, and the first several hours of their engagement go on reconstructing what happened in March. When the records are already current and validated, that work starts from finished books. Invite them to the platform and they get their own access, or download the reports at year-end and hand them over.
The entries that do not post on the first pass
Any service can say it is accurate. What is worth knowing is which transactions are genuinely hard, because those are the ones that decide whether your books are right.
A card payment that is not an expense
Paying a credit-card bill from the chequing account is a transfer between two of your own accounts. Treated as an expense it inflates your costs and understates what you still owe. It is the single most common thing worth catching, and it is a rule, not a guess.
Sales tax that looks like revenue
Tax you collected is money you are holding for the government, not income. When it lands in the revenue line, your business looks more profitable than it is, and the filing later comes as a surprise.
The receipt that arrives three weeks late
The bank line shows up long before the receipt does. Rather than leaving the transaction uncategorized, the expense is recorded and flagged as waiting for its document, then updated when the receipt finally appears.
Something that is genuinely ambiguous
A large payment to a supplier you have never used, with no document attached, is not something a model should decide alone. It stops, and a person looks at it. That is the whole design in one sentence.
Bookkeeping service pricing, in full
Your plan is decided by your document volume. Every plan includes the same workflow: AI processing, rule validation, human review when it is needed, reports, sales-tax figures and accountant access.
For owner-operated businesses with steady, modest volume.
Start free trialFor businesses with suppliers, clients and regular invoicing.
Start free trialFor higher-volume businesses that want everything maintained.
Start free trialOnly need the receipts sorted? Receipt Automation runs from $29 CAD a month for 100 documents, $49 for 300 and $69 for 500, without the double-entry ledger or the reviewer. Every plan is side by side on pricing. Prices in CAD; taxes may apply.
Bookkeeping packages for small business, and what separates them
Answer first: the three packages differ by document volume and nothing else. Starter, Growth and Pro all include the same workflow, the same reviewer, the same reports and the same accountant access.
That is deliberate, and worth being explicit about, because tiered pricing usually means features held back from the cheapest plan. Nothing is held back here. A business on Starter gets the same validated double-entry books and the same human review as one on Pro; it simply sends fewer documents. So the only question worth asking yourself is roughly how many receipts, bills and invoices you put through in a normal month, and the right package follows from that.
What happens if I pick the wrong one
You move plan. Volume is not a contract term and a busy month is not a penalty. If you are genuinely unsure, start on Starter during the free trial and look at your actual document count before committing to anything. Guessing high to be safe is the more expensive mistake.
Bookkeeping help for small business, without paying for hours
Answer first: if you want the receipt pile to stop being a job, the base product at $29 CAD a month is enough. If you want the books themselves kept, that is the Bookkeeping Service at $99. Most people who think they need a bookkeeper need the second.
What makes this affordable is not that the work is cheaper. It is that you are not paying an hourly rate for data entry. The repetitive part is automated and the price is fixed per plan, so the bill does not move because a month was messy. The judgment work that genuinely needs a person still gets one, and that is included rather than billed on top.
If you are weighing this against hiring someone, or against doing it yourself for another year, the honest answer is that it depends on your volume and how much of your own time you are losing to it now. Start the trial, send a real month, and decide with the actual numbers in front of you rather than an estimate.
Local bookkeeping services, without a local office
If you searched for bookkeepers near you, here is the honest version: we have no office in your city and never will. The service is delivered online across Canada and the United States, which is why it works the same whether you are in a downtown tower or forty minutes outside one.
What a bookkeeping service near you genuinely needs to get right is your province's sales tax, and that is handled per province rather than generically. Three cities have a page of their own, because their tax positions are genuinely different rather than differently labelled:
Bookkeeping services in Toronto
Ontario's single combined HST: one registration, one return, and the whole rate potentially recoverable.
Bookkeeping services in Vancouver
British Columbia's GST and PST: two taxes, two authorities, one receipt, and only one of them comes back.
Bookkeeping services in Calgary
Alberta charges no provincial sales tax, so the difficulty sits on the corporate side instead.
We also work with businesses in Montreal and Edmonton, along with the rest of Canada and the United States; those two do not have a page of their own yet. Pricing is in Canadian dollars wherever you are.
The questions owners actually ask
Anything not here, email support and a person answers.
What happens when the AI is not confident?
The entry does not post. It goes to a review queue worked by a trained reviewer on our staff, who opens the source document and posts the correct treatment through the same accounting engine. You never see that queue and you are never asked to approve a category.
Do you file my tax returns?
No. We maintain the bookkeeping records and produce the reports and sales-tax figures behind a filing. The return itself is filed by you or your accountant. Nothing on this page is tax advice.
Does this replace my accountant?
No, and it is not meant to. Your accountant does year-end, adjusting entries and tax work. We keep the books current through the year so their work starts from finished records rather than a folder of receipts.
What if an entry is wrong after it has posted?
It is corrected by reversing the original and posting a replacement. Both entries stay in the register, both are numbered, and the link between them is visible. Nothing is edited in place and nothing disappears, which is what makes the books defensible later.
Do I have to connect my bank?
Bank and credit-card connections are part of the Bookkeeping Service and run through Plaid, so your banking credentials never reach us. Bank statement files are not a supported upload: the platform works from receipts, invoices and connected transactions.
Can I invite my accountant?
Yes. Invite them by email and they get their own workspace with access to your records and reports. Invitations are single-use, matched to their email address, and they expire. If you would rather not, download the reports at year-end and hand them over instead.
Send us a month of documents and see what comes back
Fifteen days free, no credit card, no obligation. If it does not save you the evenings, you have lost nothing but a month of receipts you were going to have to enter anyway.
No credit card required.