Why Bokeping
Books shouldn’t need a translator.
Most tools make you choose: simple words with flimsy books, or real books wrapped in jargon. Bokeping refuses the trade — a true double-entry ledger underneath, plain English on top.
The loop
Three jobs, on repeat
Watch your money
Bank feeds, invoices, and bills flow into one double-entry ledger as they happen — nothing waits for a bookkeeping day.
Say what it means
Cash, coming in, going out. Plain English on the surface, real accounting underneath — jargon only where your accountant needs it.
Tell you what to do
Chase this invoice. Review that expense. A bill is due Friday. One next step at a time, each with a link that does it.
Invoicing
< 1 min
from new invoice to sent
Banking
1 click
to sort a bank transaction
Reports
To the penny
statements that tie out
The receipts
Small moments where it earns its keep
Tuesday, 7:50 AM
The invoice chased at breakfast
The dashboard flagged INV-0172 — 12 days overdue, $1,840. One click sent the reminder; the payment landed online that afternoon and posted itself. Total effort: the click, over toast.
Friday, 4:12 PM
The 12-minute reconciliation
Month-end used to mean a printed statement and a highlighter. This time the feed had already matched 28 of 28 transactions, the difference read $0.00, and the whole ceremony took 12 minutes — most of it double-checking out of habit.
January, year-end
The accountant who found nothing to fix
The CPA logged into the free portal expecting the usual archaeology. Every entry balanced, every correction traceable, sales tax already reported by period. Her email, in full: “There’s nothing here for me to clean up.”
Under the automation
Automation that shows its work
The industry is offering a trade right now: let the software do more of the work, and stop asking how it got there. Here you never have to stop asking — everything Bokeping does for you leaves something you can open, question, and undo.
Suggested, not posted
The bank feed proposes a match; you confirm it. Nothing reaches your books until you say yes, and the feed is read-only — Bokeping can read your transactions and can never move your money. Imports work the same way: every row comes back reported, landed, skipped as a duplicate, or flagged with a reason.
Reversed, not erased
Corrections never overwrite. Bokeping reverses the original entry and posts the fix beside it, so your reports show today’s number while the history still shows what it was before. Every financial change carries a trail: what changed, who changed it, when.
Balanced, or refused
Debits equal credits, or the entry doesn’t post at all. The ledger enforces that rule instead of trusting that someone checked, so no automatic step can leave your books quietly lopsided.
Traceable to the document
Click any line on any report and keep going — to the transactions behind it, to the balanced entry behind those, to the document itself. Nothing ends in a total you’re asked to take on faith.
The point
The question worth asking any automated bookkeeping product isn’t how much it does for you. It’s whether you can check what it did.
Software that can’t show its work is asking for trust it hasn’t earned.
The honest comparison
Where Bokeping actually differs
| What matters | Spreadsheets | Old-school software | Bokeping |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tells you what needs doing next | No | No | Yes |
| Plain English, no account codes | Sort of | No | Yes |
| Real double-entry ledger | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bank feed does the typing | No | Yes | Yes |
| Numbers that always tie out | No | Yes | Yes |
| Learnable in an afternoon | Yes | No | Yes |
| Free accountant access | No | Extra seat | Every plan |
| Price to start | Free | $35+/mo | Free |
Deliberate gaps
Four things we won’t build
Tools rot when they try to do everything. These four gaps are deliberate, and they aren’t a roadmap.
Not a CRM
Contacts carry balances and history — not sales pipelines. Your books stay books.
Not an ERP
Accounting all the way down, rather than ten modules that each stop halfway.
Not a tax filer
We get your numbers filing-ready and hand them to the pro (or tool) that files.
Payroll: integrate, don’t imitate
Payroll belongs with payroll specialists. Bokeping keeps the books that receive it.
Open the books, get told the two things that need doing, do them, close it. That’s the whole relationship we’re designing for.
FAQs
The skeptic’s questions
No — it’s translating it. Underneath every “coming in” and “going out” is a true double-entry ledger: every entry balances, corrections reverse and repost rather than overwrite, and closed periods stay closed. Click any number on any report and you can follow it to its source. The words are simple; the books are not simplified.
The plans grow first: Free to Starter to Growth (inventory, multi-currency) to Scale (API access), with your history intact at every step. And because the ledger is real and your data exports cleanly, if you ever do leave, you leave with proper books — not a data hostage situation.
Judge the books, not the birthday. Bokeping enforces the rules that make accounting trustworthy — balanced entries, an append-only audit trail, period locking — and lets you verify all of it yourself: reconcile against your bank, drill any report line to its source, invite your accountant to inspect for free. Trust that can be checked beats trust that’s merely old.
Real working papers, not a simplified export: the full general ledger, trial balance, statements on cash or accrual basis, and the audit trail behind every mutation. They get their own free login on any plan — you keep the plain English, they get the debits and credits.
Less than the category would like you to assume, and we’d rather say so plainly. The automation that earns its place is pattern-matching: Bokeping recognizes the payees you’ve already confirmed and suggests the same treatment next time, and it matches incoming bank activity to the invoices and bills you’ve already entered. It gets better because you corrected it, not because it guessed harder. We don’t run an autonomous month-end close, we don’t post to your books unattended, and we won’t pretend otherwise to sound modern.
You correct it, and the correction appends rather than overwrites. Bokeping reverses the original entry and posts the fixed one, so your reports show the right number while the trail still shows the mistake, the fix, and when each happened. Then the suggestion takes your correction as the new rule for that payee — the same error doesn’t come back next month.
Judge it with your own books
Import your data free and see what it tells you to do first.
Ready to know your money?
We’re ready when you are. Free to start, up and running in minutes.