Updated 4 min read
Do the books match the bank?
Two exports in, the exceptions out: a reconciliation table, a chart, a one-page PDF for the bookkeeper and a five-slide deck, all from one thread with the Accountant.
End of the month at Hoffmann Tischlerei, and Lena wants one answer: does what the books say customers paid in August match what actually reached the bank? She has two exports, the payments she recorded and the bank statement for the same weeks. Brigitte Sauer, the bookkeeper, needs a summary, and on Monday the team meets.
This is one thread with the Accountant, four messages long. Every picture below is the real reply.
Two files in, the exceptions out
Lena attached both CSV files to one line: reconcile them and show me anything that doesn't match.
Three customers matched, Familie Wagner, Architekturbüro Lenz and Café Ostend, each arriving two days after the recorded date. Two did not: Familie Brandt paid fifty euros short, and a recorded payment from Tischlerei Nachbar never showed up in the bank at all. That is €1,550 the books can't account for, and the working is attached as a spreadsheet.
The table in the reply was not typed by the Accountant. It wrote a short program that read both files, and the program printed the table. The app draws it from those numbers, so what you read is what was computed.
How I got this
Every reply starts with a quiet line, Done in 48s, that opens to the steps it took. Beside it, How I got this opens to what the reply drew on: the files it read, the web pages it looked at, the colleagues it asked. Here it is the two CSVs, and pressing one opens it beside the thread.
The line stays with the reply after a reload, so a week later you can still see which files a number came from.
Ask for the picture
The chart is drawn in the thread, not left as a file to download. The same program computed the bars from the same two files, and the line under it says where the figures came from. A chart, a table or a row of headline numbers in a reply is part of the reply: it doesn't clutter the Files screen.
One page for the bookkeeper
Next: a one-page PDF for Brigitte, with the chart, the two exceptions and what she should chase this week.
The PDF came back in German. Nobody asked for that. Brigitte is German, and the Accountant wrote the document in her language. If you want English, say so in the next line.
Documents like this one are written as a page and then rendered on A4 by the platform. Before replying, the Accountant looks at the rendered pages and fixes what is wrong, such as a table running off the page or a chart over the footer. The reply then shows the first page, so you can read it before you open it.
The same numbers as slides
The last line asked for five slides for Monday's team meeting, with speaker notes.
A deck comes as two files: a PowerPoint you can open and edit, and a PDF of the same slides. The reply shows slide 1. Charts in the PowerPoint are real PowerPoint charts, not pictures of charts.
The deck carries the business's name. You can give it the business's own look in Settings, under Your business, in Logo and colour: the logo then sits on the title and closing slides and the colour replaces the house accent. The AI Employees never draw a logo themselves and never take one from your website.
What runs underneath
Everything past the first question ran as a program the Accountant wrote, in an isolated sandbox with no network. It sees the files named for that run, files the person asking could already open, and nothing else in the account.
The limits, as the code sets them today:
- a program runs for at most 30 seconds
- at most 5 files in and 5 files out per run, 25 MB in total
- each person can run 20 of these an hour
- Python with pandas, numpy, openpyxl, python-docx and python-pptx, and nothing can be installed
The sandbox stays with the thread for ten minutes of quiet, which is why the chart, the PDF and the deck each started from the two CSVs already there instead of asking for them again.
Where the files end up
The spreadsheet, the PDF and the deck are ordinary files: on the Files screen with everything else. The spreadsheet and the PDF open in the document panel beside the thread; the deck downloads. To send the PDF to Brigitte, ask the Assistant: once a mailbox is connected, the email waits on a card you approve, with the file attached.
For receipts and supplier invoices rather than bank exports, see Receipts in, books out.
Try it on your own business.
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