Commonwealth AI.
What We Deploy DEP.04

Financial & Operational Automation

Books that close themselves. Almost.

We automate the workflows that keep your money straight — invoicing, collections, reconciliation, expense capture, ops reporting — so finance closes faster, gets cleaner numbers, and stops chasing the same thing every month.

Book a Close Review 30 min · We’ll skip the demo. Bring last month’s close.
Stack QuickBooksStripeXeroPlaidMake.comn8nSupabaseAnthropic Claude
Diagnosis

You need this if your bookkeeper is the most load-bearing person you can’t replace.

Financial and operational automation is the layer between your accounting system and the rest of the business. Stripe charges that find their invoice. Vendor bills that get coded and routed. Past-due invoices that escalate without somebody remembering to send them. Ops metrics that show up in finance’s reporting without a copy-paste. We deploy this on QuickBooks, Stripe, Make.com, and the email platform you already use.

Our clients here are usually founder-led companies between $2M and $50M revenue. The bookkeeper is heroic. The CFO is part-time or fractional. Close takes a week longer than it should because three workflows are still manual and one of them is chasing a single client every month. We do not replace the bookkeeper. We delete the parts of the job that shouldn’t have been theirs in the first place. Common signs:

  • The monthly close lands a week or two later than it should because somebody is chasing receipts, vendor bills, or one specific client's PO.
  • Past-due invoices wait until somebody remembers to send the reminder. Some get sent. Some don't.
  • Stripe and QuickBooks disagree on what's been collected, and reconciling them is a Friday afternoon ritual.
  • Operational metrics — utilization, hours by job, revenue by source — live in spreadsheets that get updated when finance has time.
What you get

Six concrete deliverables. No vapor.

01 Deliverable

An automated invoicing pipeline.

Triggered by your CRM stage, your project tracker, or your scheduling tool — invoices generated in QuickBooks or Stripe with the right line items, the right tax codes, and the right contact. Drafts route to finance for one-click approval. Nothing autosends.

02 Deliverable

A collections runner that doesn't forget.

Past-due invoices escalate on a written cadence — reminder at day 3, second notice at day 14, escalation to the account owner at day 30, and so on. Customizable per customer. Drafts go to a human. Sends are explicit.

03 Deliverable

Stripe-to-QuickBooks reconciliation, automated.

Every Stripe charge, refund, dispute, and payout matched to the corresponding invoice and journal entry. Exceptions land in a queue with a human-readable explanation. We close the gap that took a person every Friday.

04 Deliverable

An expense and vendor bill capture flow.

Inbound vendor bills auto-coded against your chart of accounts, attached to the right vendor record, and queued for approval. Receipts photographed in the field tagged to the right job. We do not write back to the GL without an explicit approval click.

05 Deliverable

An operational dashboard finance can trust.

Hours by job, utilization, revenue by source, AR aging, gross margin by line — pulled from your operational systems and your accounting system into one view. Refreshes every hour. Same numbers everybody else is looking at.

06 Deliverable

A close-day checklist that runs itself.

A scripted sequence that pulls the bank statement, runs the reconciliation, flags variances, generates the close packet, and emails it to whoever signs off. Close goes from a week to a day. Often less.

Architecture

One ledger. Many feeders.

The accounting system at the center — QuickBooks for most of our clients, Xero for a few — with a row of feeder workflows: Stripe, the CRM, the scheduling tool, the bill-capture inbox, the expense app. Each feeder lands data in a staging table in Supabase. A reconciliation step matches it against existing records and queues anything ambiguous for human review.

Reversibility is the deliverable. Every write to QuickBooks is preceded by a draft in Supabase that finance approves. Every write is logged. Anything we touch can be unwound, traced, and explained.

DEP.04
Title
One-Ledger Reference Architecture
DWG No.
204.01.00
Scale
1 / 100
Process

Seven weeks, written down. No surprises.

  1. Week 0

    Diagnose

    We shadow finance through a full close cycle. We log every manual step, every reconciliation, every chase. We come back with a single page that names the bottlenecks and the proposed automation order.

  2. Week 1

    Architect

    We pick the priority workflows, design the staging schema, and agree on approval points with finance and the controller. Sign-off before any system gets touched.

  3. Weeks 2–3

    Build invoicing & reconciliation

    Highest-impact, lowest-risk first. Invoices and Stripe reconciliation typically come online here. Internal evals run on backfilled data.

  4. Week 4

    Build collections & expense capture

    Cadence rules written into the system, vendor coding rules trained and reviewed. Drafts route to finance. Nothing sends without approval.

  5. Week 5

    Shadow mode

    All flows run against live data but produce drafts only. Finance approves manually for one full week. We compare to what they would have done.

  6. Week 6

    Cut over

    Approval thresholds get raised based on the shadow week's accuracy. Daily standups during cutover. Close-day checklist gets run together for the first time.

  7. Week 7+

    Care

    Optional retainer. We monitor the reconciliation queue, tune the collections cadence, add new workflows as the business grows. Or we hand over the runbook and disappear.

FAQ

The questions you’d ask on a call.

Q.01 Are you going to break our books?
No. We don't write to the general ledger without an explicit approval click from finance. Every workflow runs in shadow mode for a week before it goes live, producing drafts that get compared to what your team would have done. Every write is reversible and logged with the user, the timestamp, and the source. Your CPA and your auditor can trace any entry back to its source. We've never broken a client's books. We've fixed a few.
Q.02 Will this replace our bookkeeper or our fractional CFO?
No, and we'll say no on the call if you ask hopefully. The work this eliminates is the part of the job that nobody enjoyed — chasing receipts, re-keying vendor bills, reconciling Stripe to QuickBooks line by line. Your bookkeeper gets to do the actual accounting. Your CFO gets numbers a week earlier. We've had clients re-deploy a bookkeeper to revenue analysis because there was finally time. We've never had one ask us to write a layoff plan.
Q.03 Where does our financial data go?
It stays in your accounts. QuickBooks, Stripe, Xero — all under your contracts and your security model. The staging layer runs in your Supabase, in the region you specify. Nothing routes through us. Nothing gets sent to a model vendor without an explicit data processing agreement and your written approval. We can walk a CPA, an auditor, or a SOC 2 reviewer through the data flow on a single page.
Q.04 How long until something works?
Three weeks for the first close acceleration, six for the full pipeline. The three-week mark is where invoicing and Stripe reconciliation typically come online — that alone shaves a day or two off close for most clients. Full cutover with collections, expense capture, and the close-day checklist is week six or seven. We don't run 12-month 'finance transformation' programs. If the work needs more than that, the scope is wrong.
Q.05 What does this cost?
A typical engagement is $30K to $90K fixed-fee for the build, depending on how many workflows and how unusual the chart of accounts is. SaaS costs are yours and rarely move much — Make.com or n8n at $20 to $200 a month, Supabase at $25, your existing QuickBooks and Stripe plans untouched. We don't take a percentage of revenue, of AR, or of recovered cash. We charge for the build and for the optional retainer. Nothing else.
Q.06 Self-host or cloud?
Default is cloud — Stripe, QuickBooks Online, Make.com cloud, Supabase cloud. The faster, cheaper, better-monitored option for almost every operator under $50M. We self-host (n8n, Supabase, Postgres) when regulated data or contractual residency rules require it. Self-hosted is a 1.5x build cost and the ops burden moves to your team. We'll tell you which one you actually need.
Q.07 We've got QuickBooks Desktop. Are we stuck?
Mostly, yes. The QuickBooks Desktop API is fragile and the integration ecosystem around it is shrinking every year. We can automate the workflows that flow into Desktop — Stripe reconciliation, invoicing, expense capture — through a staging layer, but we'll usually recommend a migration to QuickBooks Online or Xero in the same engagement. The migration adds 2 to 4 weeks. Most clients save the cost back in the first close.
Engagement

What working with us looks like.

Typical scope
$30K – $90K

Fixed-fee build. Five to eight workflows depending on close shape.

Typical timeline
6 – 7 weeks

Diagnose in week zero, full cutover by week six or seven.

Optional retainer
From $4K / mo

Reconciliation queue oversight, cadence tuning, new workflow additions.

Not included
Bookkeeping · CFO advisory · Big-ERP migrations

We don’t replace finance. We delete the parts that shouldn’t be theirs.

Next step DEP.04.99

Send us last month’s close.

Tell us how many days it took, where it got stuck, who chased what. We’ll tell you what we’d automate first and what it would cost. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you who is.