Business accounting automation
Consolidate entities, automate categorization with multi condition rules, and export files your accounting package accepts without hand editing.
Once you look after more than one set of books, the work stops being about reading a statement and starts being about repetition. The same rules, month after month, across accounts that belong to different entities, ending in a file that has to load into an accounting package without anyone retyping it. Karchu's Business plan covers that middle part: a consolidated view across entities, a rules engine that can express a real condition rather than a single keyword, and exports shaped for the package you actually use.
One report across every entity
Each business, client or department normally lives in its own Karchu workspace, so permissions and documents stay separate. The all entities view puts them back together for reporting only. It totals money in, money out and net movement for the period you choose, and then breaks the same period down by entity so you can see which one is carrying the numbers. Currencies are never mixed: a workspace billing in euros and one billing in rupees are reported side by side under their own headings, because adding them together would produce a figure that means nothing.
Transfers between your own accounts are left out of the totals, so a payment moved from a current account to a card account does not appear as both income and spend. Top payers and top payees are listed per currency, and the monthly chart shows the in and out bars next to each other rather than a single net line, which is what you want when a good month and a heavy month cancel out. The whole thing downloads as a CSV that keeps the entity and currency columns, so it drops straight into a board pack or a spreadsheet model.
Access is resolved on the server from your memberships. You only ever see the entities you belong to, and joining or leaving a workspace changes what the report covers immediately.
Rules that describe what you actually mean
Keyword rules break down quickly in a business. "Amazon" is a supplier, a marketplace payout and an office purchase. A refund and a charge share the same merchant name. A recurring transfer looks exactly like revenue until you read the reference. An advanced rule fixes that by combining conditions: description contains one thing, counterparty is another, amount is at least a threshold, direction is money out. All the conditions have to match before the rule fires.
The fields you can test on are description, counterparty, merchant, reference, amount and direction. Text conditions support contains, does not contain, is exactly, starts with, ends with, and a pattern match when you need one. Amount conditions compare the size of the transaction, so you can separate a large supplier payment from small card spend at the same merchant without worrying about signs.
When a rule matches it can set a category, mark the row as a transfer between your own accounts so it drops out of the in and out totals, and mark it reviewed so it stops appearing in the review queue. Before you save anything, the test button counts how many of your existing transactions match and shows a sample, so you find out that a rule is too broad while it is still a draft. Saving with apply to past turned on updates the rows you already imported in the same step.
Your own rules still take priority over rules Karchu learned from your edits, and both take priority over the built in defaults, exactly as before. Existing keyword rules keep working untouched.
Exports your accounting package accepts
A generic CSV is fine for a spreadsheet and painful for an accounting package, because every package wants its own column names and its own idea of how a debit is written. Karchu produces the specific shapes instead of making you reshape them:
| Format | Columns |
|---|---|
| QuickBooks, three column | Date, description, single signed amount |
| QuickBooks, four column | Date, description, debit, credit |
| Xero bank statement | Date, amount, payee, description, reference, account code |
| Zoho Books | Date, description, amount, reference, account, contact |
| Tally day book | Date, voucher type, ledger, debit, credit, narration |
| Generic ledger | Every field, for any package not listed above |
Account codes, account names and contacts come from a mapping you set once per workspace and per format. Map your categories to your chart of accounts, save it, and every future export uses the same codes, which is what keeps a monthly import from turning into a reconciliation exercise. Before the file downloads, a quick check reports how many rows have no category and how many have no account code, so you fix the gaps here rather than after your accounting package rejects the import.
The export always covers the transactions currently on screen, filters included. Narrow to one month, one account or one category, then export exactly that.
How the three fit together
In practice the month looks like this. Statements, payout reports and invoices go in through the business document analyzer. Rules categorize the rows as they arrive, including marking internal transfers so the totals stay honest. The pay in and pay out report tells you what actually moved, per entity and per currency. Then the accounting export hands the finished rows to whichever package holds the ledger. The parts you used to do by hand are the parts that repeat, which is exactly the part software should take.
Frequently asked questions
What is a consolidated multi entity view?
One report covering every workspace you belong to. Money in, money out and net movement are totalled across all of your entities, each currency is reported separately rather than added together, and every entity also appears on its own line so you can see which one moved the numbers.
What can an advanced rule do that a keyword rule cannot?
A keyword rule looks at one word in the description. An advanced rule combines several conditions on description, counterparty, merchant, reference, amount and direction, and all of them have to match. When they do it can set a category, mark the row as a transfer between your own accounts, or mark it reviewed.
Can I try a rule before it changes anything?
Yes. Test the rule and Karchu shows how many of your existing transactions match, with a sample of them, before you save. You can then choose whether to apply it to transactions you already imported or only to new ones.
Which accounting formats can I export?
QuickBooks three column and four column, Xero bank statement, Zoho Books, Tally day book, and a generic ledger layout that carries every field for anything else.
How do account codes get into the export?
You map each category to an account code, an account name and an optional contact once per workspace and per format. The mapping is saved, so the same categories land in the same ledger accounts every month.
Which plan includes this?
Multi entity reporting, advanced rules and accounting exports are part of the Business plan, and are also included on Enterprise. Starter and Pro keep keyword rules and the CSV, Excel and PDF exports they already have.
Multi entity reporting, advanced rules and accounting exports come with the Business plan. See pricing, or read how accounting exports work in more detail.