For accounting & bookkeeping firms
The client document pile is the constraint on how many files your firm can carry. Not the work — the pile. We automate the intake, the extraction and the categorisation, and leave the judgement with your staff.
You bill judgement.
You spend the season typing.
Every firm we speak to describes the same shape. Clients send documents in whatever form they like — a phone photo of a receipt, a PDF bank statement, a shoebox scanned at 200dpi, a spreadsheet with the totals already wrong. Someone junior opens each one, works out what it is, keys it in, and chases the client for the six that are missing.
None of that is the work you are qualified to charge for. It is the toll you pay to reach the work you charge for — and in the first quarter it is the reason capable people are doing data entry at eleven at night.
The number that matters is not how many clients you have. It is how many documents per client per month, and how many minutes each one takes before it is usable.
Run your own numbers before you believe ours
Take a firm carrying 250 monthly bookkeeping clients averaging 25 source documents each. That is 6,250 documents a month. At four minutes of handling apiece — opening, identifying, keying, filing — that is roughly 417 hours, or about CAD $15,800 a month in loaded staff time at the $36–40/hour figure we publish.
In January through April that same pile arrives compressed, which is why firms hire seasonal staff at a premium and still miss deadlines. The compression is the cost, not the annual total.
Those figures are illustrative. Yours will differ — and the point of the assessment is to measure them rather than assume them.
Why seasonality changes the maths
Most automation business cases are built on an annual average. Yours should not be. A system that removes 70% of document handling is worth far more in the eleven weeks when your team is at capacity than the arithmetic suggests across twelve months.
The honest version of that argument also cuts the other way: if your pile is genuinely flat and modest, the annual figure is the right one and it may not clear the bar. We will tell you which case you are in.
What we automate first
In roughly the order the payback arrives. We would rather do one of these properly than four of them thinly.
Client document intake
Documents arrive by email, portal upload or a shared folder and are identified on arrival — invoice, receipt, bank statement, T-slip, payroll summary — then matched to the right client and period without anyone opening them first. Unreadable and ambiguous items are flagged, not guessed.
Extraction with reconciliation
Vendor, date, subtotal, tax and total pulled out and checked against each other in deterministic code. Tax that does not reconcile to the subtotal is caught before it reaches your ledger, because a plausible wrong number is worse than a blank field.
Categorisation you control
Coding suggested against your own chart of accounts and your history for that client — not a generic model's guess. Confidence below your threshold routes to review. The corrections your team makes feed the next evaluation round.
The missing-document chase
The system knows which recurring documents have not arrived for a period and can draft the follow-up. A person still sends it. Client communication is your relationship, not something to hand to an agent.
Write into your ledger
Posted into QuickBooks, Xero, Sage or your practice-management system through its API, or produced as a validated import file where no API exists. Every write is logged with the source document that produced it.
Whose servers hold your clients' financial records?
You hold financial information for other people, under professional obligations and usually under an engagement letter that says something specific about confidentiality. That makes "where does this data go" a question you have to be able to answer — to your professional body, to your insurer, and to the client who asks.
We are incorporated in Ontario and deploy into the region you choose: a Canadian region, a U.S. region, your own cloud tenancy, or your own hardware. Which model provider sees which fields is written into the statement of work, and fields you nominate never leave your boundary at all.
Verify that before you take our word for it — including ours. Ask any vendor for their registered office and the contracting entity, not the flag on the marketing site.
What we commit to on dataThree questions worth asking any vendor
1. Which legal entity am I contracting with, and in which jurisdiction is it registered?
2. Name the region where my clients' documents are processed and stored — and put it in the agreement.
3. Which third parties see the document contents, and what are they permitted to do with them?
A vendor who cannot answer all three in writing has not thought about it, which tells you what you need to know.
The same published prices as everything else
There is no industry premium. Prices in Canadian dollars, verified 23 August 2026. An advisory hour is CAD $195; fixed-scope advisory engagements start at CAD $4,500; minimum build engagement is CAD $9,500.
- Start here
- Automation Readiness Assessment — $12,500 (credited in full against a build within 90 days). Two weeks. Measures your real document volume, your current cost per document, and what accuracy is achievable on your actual client files.
- The build
- From $26,000 for one document type across two intake sources; $48,000 for three document types with separate rule sets and a full review queue. Four to ten weeks depending on scope.
- Running it
- $2,400 or $4,800 a month for hosting in your chosen region, monitoring, incident response and a monthly re-run of your evaluation set. Or run it in your own tenancy at no hosting fee.
When your practice software already does it. Several practice-management and bookkeeping platforms now ship receipt capture and bank-feed categorisation that is genuinely good. If you are paying for one and not using that module, turn it on first. That costs nothing and it may be the whole answer.
Under roughly 500 documents a month. The manual baseline is around CAD $1,200/month. A build in the tens of thousands will not repay that before your process changes.
When the real bottleneck is review, not entry. If your seniors are the constraint because everything needs their sign-off, automating data entry moves the queue without shortening it. That is a workflow and delegation problem, and software will not fix it.
When you are mid-migration. Changing ledger platforms next quarter? Wait. Build against the system you will actually be running.
Questions worth asking first
Every answer below is stated elsewhere on this page or on our trust page. Verify it before you take our word for it — including ours.
Whose servers hold our clients' financial records?
The region you choose: a Canadian region, a U.S. region, your own cloud tenancy, or your own hardware. We are incorporated in Ontario. Which model provider sees which fields is written into the statement of work, and fields you nominate never leave your boundary at all.
Are you SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certified?
No. Quintessentia Network Inc. is not SOC 2 certified and is not ISO 27001 certified — we are a small, owner-operated Canadian firm serving clients in Canada and the United States. If your procurement process requires either certification from every vendor, we will not pass it today, and we would rather you learn that here than three meetings in.
Is there an industry premium for accounting firms?
No — the same published prices as everything else, in Canadian dollars, verified 23 August 2026, with a minimum build engagement of CAD $9,500. The cheapest starting point is the advisory Automation Blueprint at $4,500; if you intend to build, start instead with the Automation Readiness Assessment at $12,500, two weeks, credited in full against a build within 90 days.
Does it write into QuickBooks, Xero or Sage?
Posted into QuickBooks, Xero, Sage or your practice-management system through its API, or produced as a validated import file where no API exists. Every write is logged with the source document that produced it.
Will it email our clients for the documents they have not sent?
The system knows which recurring documents have not arrived for a period and can draft the follow-up. A person still sends it. Client communication is your relationship, not something to hand to an agent.
Start with last month's pile
Count the documents that came in last month and how long each took to become usable. That single number decides whether any of this is worth your money — and you can work it out before you speak to us.
Run the fit check