Role
Hire an AI bookkeeper
It does the sorting, chasing and drafting that eats a finance afternoon, and it stops at the line where a qualified person has to sign.
What this worker is
An AI bookkeeper in Polaris is a worker you hire to prepare bookkeeping work for human approval. It categorises transactions against rules you write, lists the ones it is unsure about, chases missing receipts as tasks, and drafts the monthly close checklist. A qualified bookkeeper or accountant reviews, approves and files everything. Polaris does not provide accounting or tax advice.
- Typical output
- Categorised CSV plus exceptions list
- Core connections
- Stripe, Gmail, Google Drive
- Illustrative task
- 2.2 human-hours, $4.40
What this worker is great at
The sorting work. Given a month of transactions and the category rules your accountant actually uses, it returns a categorised file plus a separate list of the ones it would not guess at. The exceptions list is the valuable half: a short, honest column of what needs a human, instead of four hundred rows where a dozen are quietly wrong.
It is also good at chasing. Missing receipts become individual tasks with the vendor, the amount and the date already filled in, assigned to whoever spent the money, due before close. The nagging that nobody enjoys becomes a set of dated tasks on a board rather than a series of awkward messages.
And it keeps the close checklist honest. The same twenty-two steps every month, ticked as acceptance criteria as each one is genuinely done, with the state of the close visible to anyone who opens the task rather than living in the head of the person doing it.
What to connect it to
Read-only access is the right default for this role. A restricted, read-only Stripe key is safer than a full one.
Stripe
Payments, invoices and refunds, which is where most of the month's transactions originate for a software business.
Gmail
Receipts and vendor invoices arrive as email. Connect it so the chasing list is built from what is actually missing.
Google Drive
Where the categorised files and the close checklist have to end up for your accountant.
Slack
So a message about a strange charge becomes a prefilled task suggestion instead of scrolling out of sight.
Where the human stays in charge
This is a regulated field and the boundary is not negotiable.
The bookkeeper prepares
- A proposed category for each transaction
- An exceptions list with the reason for each
- Receipt-chasing tasks, owned and dated
- A drafted close checklist with progress ticked
A qualified person decides
- Whether each category is correct
- What is deductible and what is not
- Every entry that reaches the ledger of record
- Filings, returns and anything sent to a tax authority
What a month of categorisation costs
Illustrative, computed from the published human-hours formula rather than measured on a customer.
| Observed effort | Human-equivalent minutes |
|---|---|
| Picking up the task | 15 |
| 5,000 characters of written output at 90 chars/min | 56 |
| 4 acceptance criteria ticked at 8 min each | 32 |
| 1 progress comment, 2 files produced | 30 |
| Total: 2.2 human-hours at $2 | $4.40 |
What an AI bookkeeper is not good at
It is not an accountant and Polaris does not provide accounting or tax advice. Treat everything it produces as a prepared draft for a qualified person to check, exactly as you would treat work from a junior who started last month.
It does not write to your ledger. There is no path by which a Polaris worker posts an entry into your accounting system, and that is deliberate: the output is a file and a list, and a person moves it.
It will also be wrong about anything jurisdiction-specific unless you tell it the rules. VAT treatment, allowable expenses and thresholds vary by country and change by year, so the category rules in the skill file need to come from your accountant rather than from the worker's general knowledge. Where it does not know, it should push the row to the exceptions list, and the skill file should say so explicitly.
Questions people ask
+Can an AI bookkeeper file my taxes?
No. It prepares and organises work for a qualified human to review, approve and file, and Polaris does not provide accounting or tax advice. Filings, returns and anything sent to a tax authority are a person's responsibility.
+Does it write entries into our accounting system?
No. It produces files and lists that a person reviews and moves. Nothing a Polaris worker does reaches your ledger of record without a human putting it there.
+How does it know our categorisation rules?
You write them into the worker's SKILL.md, ideally with your accountant. Rules written once are applied every month, and anything the rules do not cover goes to the exceptions list rather than being guessed at.
+What access does it need to Stripe?
A restricted, read-only key is enough for categorisation and chasing, and it is the safer default. Credentials are verified live and stored server-side, so a browser cannot read them back after they are saved.
+Is it cheaper than a bookkeeping service?
It is priced differently: nothing per month, and $2 per human-hour of work actually delivered, itemised on the work log. Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on your volume, and it does not remove the need for a qualified reviewer.
Related
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Invoice tracking that produces a chase list, not a dashboard
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A monthly close that stops drifting into week two
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Vendor management that catches the notice window
Most money lost on vendors is lost by missing a cancellation deadline nobody had written down. A worker keeps the register and dates the deadlines.
Connect Stripe to Polaris
This is the one connection where the key you choose matters more than anything on this page.
Connect Gmail to Polaris
The honest version: Gmail is in the catalog, the Google sign-in flow has not shipped, and the product says pending rather than pretending.
Work log
The record that makes an unwatched run reviewable afterwards.