Fantastic product!

I really like 'boring' tools, for foundational business systems. It's a tool that will help you with one of the most common pain points (likely the most common) all businesses face. These are the areas that I particularly like to overcompensate with great tooling etc. Because if you don't look after it well, you'll need to pay that back later, with interest.

So I like to try build out systems to make the most unenjoyable work as easy as possible, allowing me to put the majority of my focus on work that is at least mildly enjoyable.

This is what Smart Clerk aims to do and from my testing so far, seems to exactly do just that. Very excited to continue switching over.

I am unsure about if it will be able to handle cases of non balance changing type transactions cleanly and automatically e.g. If you are tracking your bank card statements, but it's connected to PayPal. You purchase something via PayPal, through your card. So the transaction will be on both the card statement and PayPal statement. While with PayPal, there may also be balance changing transactions in the monthly statements.

Or other cases like, sending a batch transaction through Wise/Transferwise. So you send a batch transaction through Wise, which then distributes the payment to the multiple recipients (one payment to Wise, which is then split between many recipients in different currencies). But without it changing the balance on Wise (account that does not support holding a balance). So expenses in that case, would be dependent on the ultimate recipients.

In a single batch sent to Wise, several different expense categories can be covered. Like 3 salaries, office rent, ad placement expenses, contractor reimbursements etc. So there is categorisation but also reconciling correctly, accounting for cases like this is a bit confusing - as I'm not an accountant/bookkeeper.

I'm not sure if it can cleanly handle those cases automatically using best accounting practices. If it can, then that would be amazing. If the founder could reply to this review about those cases, it would be very helpful to me and others :)

Would be fantastic if they directly integrated Wise and PayPal via API, as those would likely be easier to add than bank feeds.

The year limitation (can't upload 2023 statements) is a bit disappointing, seeing that there is already a monthly quota which would apply anyway. From a business perspective, having new users fully migrate over is likely better for business - as it adds stickiness. I think Xero is my longest running subscription ever, precisely due to the stickiness. With a financial year ending on June 30, it means right now, a full financial year is not covered currently afaik. Jul 1 2023 -> June 30 2024 & Jul 1 2024 -> June 30 2025.

To their credit, they have added the ability to change the financial year endings to be customisable recently from user feedback. I have not tested this yet.

That said, I can live with the 2024 year limitation - just means that I'll likely need to keep records living in other systems indefinitely (or at least several years) rather than fully migrating over into the Smart Clerk ecosystem. Also a bit unclear if that means, say in 2026, I won't be able to upload documents from 2024? I've never seen a bookkeeping system that does not allow going as far back as wanted. Regardless, this is still easily a 5 star product 'in my books'.

It seems like it's possible to pay to go back earlier than 2024, but the cost is not shared publicly here and requires contacting support. So no idea how much that would be. It would be nice for the specifics of this to be known upfront.

Anyway, overall - very optimistic about Smart Clerk and if I end up being able to fully depend on it, will be a massive win.

Developer is actively listening to feedback and making updates. UI is super slick, fast and clean and looks like a lot of minor overall improvements have been added since I last tested - which is great. As well as more major updates, which the founder has been emailing to us. From the Q&A it looks like accrual accounting features will be added this year also. Clearly talented founder/dev.

Categorisation so far has seemed very accurate, so overall Smart Clerk is super promising, ultra boring and very excited to finally relieve this major pain point in a convenient way.