Turn bank statements into a real financial analysis

What financial statement analysis actually answers

"Financial analysis" is one of those phrases that means very different things depending on who is using it. For a Wall Street analyst it involves ratio analysis of quarterly filings. For a small-business owner it is usually the question "am I making money and where is it going." For an individual it is usually "am I on track this month and what should I change." Karchu focuses on the second and third versions, because that is where most people never get a straight answer without hours of manual work.

The five questions worth answering from any statement are cash flow, category breakdown, merchant concentration, recurring-charge audit, and drift or anomalies. A useful analyzer answers all five in a single view and lets you drill into any of them without leaving the page. Karchu is built around exactly those five questions.

Cash flow, done in the way that actually matters

Bank apps show you the opening and closing balance. That is not cash flow. The closing balance can be higher than the opening balance while you were still net-negative for the period, if a large deposit landed near the end. Cash flow is income minus expenses, computed independently and compared. Karchu shows this at the top of the dashboard: total money in, total money out, and the net. For a business, the same view gives you burn rate and runway estimates against your current cash balance.

Category breakdown that reflects reality

Category breakdowns fail when they use too many buckets or when the buckets are opaque. Karchu ships with sensible defaults and lets you edit them. The default set is small on purpose: five to ten buckets that map to how people actually think about their money. The result is a chart you can act on in ten seconds instead of a taxonomy you have to study.

For businesses, categorization aligns with common chart-of-accounts groupings so the output slots into your accounting software without a translation step. For individuals, categories map to typical budgeting frameworks (fixed costs, variable costs, savings, discretionary).

Merchant concentration

Every statement contains a top-ten merchant list, and every top-ten list contains at least one surprise. The name of a coffee shop where a small daily purchase became a large monthly line item. A vendor that quietly grew to a third of your operating expense. A subscription bundled with a marketplace charge that hid the real cost. Karchu ranks the top merchants by spend for the period so you see this without hunting for it.

The recurring-charge audit

Most people who have never done a subscription audit find at least thirty dollars a month in recurring charges they no longer use. Karchu identifies recurring charges by matching same-merchant same-approximate-amount charges across a rolling window. The list is your subscription audit: cancel what you do not use, re-negotiate what you do, and confirm autopays that should already have ended.

Drift and anomalies

Category drift is when a category grows without a deliberate change. Anomalies are single transactions that break the pattern. Both are impossible to spot by scrolling and trivial to spot on the right view. Karchu shows a month-over-month drift board (the categories that changed most, up or down) and flags anomalies like duplicate charges, subscription price jumps, and unusually large one-off spends.

Analysis for different audiences

Individuals use Karchu to answer "where did my money go this month and what should change." One statement, ten minutes, actionable output.

Freelancers and consultants use it to separate business from personal, split transactions across clients using tags, and export categorized data to their accountant every quarter.

Small businesses use it as an analysis layer on top of QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave: import statements, see cash-flow trends, identify vendors driving costs, and spot anomalies before the monthly close.

Accountants and bookkeepers use it to onboard new clients quickly: dropping in twelve months of statements produces a categorized dataset that would take days to build by hand, giving a real starting point for a first conversation.

Where Karchu fits alongside your other tools

Karchu is not accounting software. It does not do invoicing, payroll, or tax filing. It focuses on one thing (making bank data readable and analyzable) and does that well. Most users pair it with something else. Individuals often pair it with a personal-finance spreadsheet. Small businesses run it alongside QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave, using Karchu as the analysis surface and the accounting tool as the ledger. Accountants use it as an onboarding and review layer between the client's raw statements and their firm's system of record.

Frequently asked questions