The problem it is for

Bookkeeping is mostly transcription. A shoebox of receipts, a stack of supplier bills and twelve months of bank statements arrive, and somebody types them — supplier, date, subtotal, tax, total, which account it belongs to — one line at a time. It is the single largest block of hours in most firms, it is the work clients least want to pay for, and it is the work least improved by having a professional do it.

Vytract will be the part of Vylan that does the transcription. Not the judgement — you still decide what the expense is and whether it belongs in the business. The typing.

Getting documents in

Capture is the part that decides whether a tool like this survives contact with a real client, so it will not depend on the client learning anything new. Every route lands in the same review queue:

• A forwarding address per client. The client forwards a supplier's email straight from their inbox and the attachment is picked up. No app, no login, no habit to build.
• Photos from a phone. A receipt photographed at the till, sent through the client portal they already use.
• Drag a folder in. A year of PDFs at once, from your desk, when a client hands you a memory stick in March.
• Documents already in Vylan. Anything the client has uploaded to an engagement can be pushed into Vytract without being sent twice.

What it will read off the page

For each document, Vytract will pull out the fields a bookkeeper types: supplier name, invoice or receipt number, date, currency, subtotal, each tax line separately, and the total. Canadian tax is the reason the tax lines are separate — GST, QST, HST and provincial variations have to come out as distinct amounts, because a single lumped tax figure cannot be reconciled and cannot be claimed.

Where a document has line items — a supplier invoice with eight products on it — it will pull the individual lines too, so a bill can be split across accounts rather than coded as one lump.

Bank and credit-card statements will be handled as their own kind: a statement will come out as a list of transactions with dates, descriptions and amounts, plus the opening and closing balances so the extraction can be checked against the page rather than trusted.

Learning how you code

The first time you tell Vytract that a bill from a given supplier belongs in a particular account, with a particular tax treatment, it will remember — for that client. The second bill from that supplier will arrive already coded, waiting for you to agree rather than waiting for you to type.

This is deliberately per-client rather than firm-wide. The same supplier is a cost of sale for one client and an overhead for another, and a rule that guessed across your whole book would be wrong often enough to stop being trusted.

The review queue

Nothing will post itself. Extracted documents will land in a queue where each one shows the numbers it read beside the original page, so checking a figure never means opening the file separately.

1. Open the queue and see what has arrived since you last looked.
2. Scan the coded lines. Anything the extraction was unsure about will be marked, so your attention goes to the handful that need it rather than the whole batch.
3. Correct what is wrong — and the correction becomes the rule next time.
4. Approve, and publish to your books.

Duplicates will be caught before they reach you: the same receipt photographed twice, or a bill both emailed and handed over on paper, will be flagged rather than posted twice.

Getting it into the books

Approved transactions will publish to the ledger the client is actually on — QuickBooks Online, Xero, or a Sage 50 export file — using the same connections Vylan already has. The document itself goes with the transaction, so the receipt is attached to the entry in the books rather than living in a separate folder that has to be searched during a review.

How it will fit the rest of Vylan

Vytract will not be a separate product with a separate client list. It will be a part of Vylan that uses the clients, the portal, the document checks and the accounting connections that are already there — which is why a bookkeeping engagement will be able to run on the same automated flow as everything else, with the capture queue as one of its stages.