Who uses Karchu

Why the same tool fits very different jobs

A bank statement is one of the few documents almost every financial task runs through. A freelancer needs it to work out what they actually earned after fees. An accountant needs it to reconcile a client's books. A landlord needs it to prove which rent payments landed and when. A mortgage applicant needs three to six months of it in a format an underwriter will accept. The document is the same. What changes is the question being asked of it and the shape of the answer that counts as finished.

That is why Karchu is built as an extraction and categorization engine with different reporting surfaces on top, rather than as five separate products. Every account gets the same parsing, the same OCR fallback for scanned pages, the same rules engine, and the same export formats. The persona pages below describe the workflow around that core: which reports matter, which categories are worth setting up first, what the output usually needs to look like, and where the common mistakes are.

What every one of these workflows shares

Statements arrive in the wrong format. Banks emit PDFs designed to be printed, not parsed. Columns drift between pages, descriptions wrap onto second lines, and running balances get mistaken for amounts. Older statements and anything from a smaller institution are often scans, which need OCR before any of the rest can happen. Karchu handles digital and scanned PDFs, plus CSV and Excel, so you are not doing format triage before you start.

Categorization is where the time goes. Extraction is the part people expect to be hard, but it is usually the sorting that eats the afternoon. Karchu categorizes automatically on upload, then lets you write rules that apply backwards across every statement you have already uploaded. Correcting a merchant once fixes it in every past and future month rather than just the row in front of you.

The output has to leave the tool. Nobody's work ends inside a dashboard. Accountants need QBO or Xero-shaped CSV. Freelancers need a schedule of income and deductible expenses. Landlords need a per-property breakdown. Mortgage applicants need a clean PDF summary. Every view in Karchu exports to CSV, Excel, QBO, and PDF, with the currency and date formatting you selected rather than whatever the bank used.

The data is sensitive. None of these audiences want their bank credentials in a third party's hands, and several of them are handling someone else's money and legally cannot. Karchu never connects to a bank. You upload a document, it is scoped to your workspace, and it stays there until you delete it.

Not sure which page applies to you?

Pick by the output you need rather than by job title. If you are preparing figures for someone else to review, a lender, a tax authority, an accountant, start with the accountants or mortgage pages, since both are about producing defensible output. If the figures are for your own decisions, start with freelancers or small business. If you are tracking several separate sets of accounts that must never mix, the landlords page covers how workspaces and per-property separation work.