Cloud bookkeeping services that stay current.

Cloud bookkeeping services are the daily upkeep of your ledger inside accounting software you already own. Bank feeds import overnight, receipts are captured and matched to transactions, every line is coded to your chart of accounts, and each balance sheet account is reconciled before the month closes on the fifth business day.

Bookkeeping is the foundation everything else in finance stands on. Get it wrong and management reports lag, tax filings miscalculate, cash flow forecasts become guesswork, and audits turn into a scramble. Get it right and your business gains clarity, month after month, predictably.

Accountaire was built around the idea that bookkeeping should be a continuous discipline, not a quarterly cleanup. Bank feeds import daily. Receipts flow in through Dext or AutoEntry, captured by OCR and reviewed by your accountant. Transactions are categorised against rules tailored to your business, then reconciled and reviewed before they land in your management accounts.

The result is a ledger that's never more than a few days behind reality, and a finance function you trust enough to actually make decisions with.

Every engagement is led by an ACCA-qualified senior accountant. They know your business by name and number, set your coding rules, review the AI-categorised entries, and own the relationship. You don't get rotated between juniors; you don't get standardised templates that don't fit your business.

Bookkeeping failures arrive in a predictable order. The bank feed breaks first, usually when a card is reissued or an Open Banking consent lapses at its 90-day expiry. Uncoded transactions then bank up in suspense. The VAT return goes out on estimates. The year-end accounts need a restatement, and the accountant charges for the rebuild. By that point the repair costs more than a year of monthly fees, which is why we run a separate catch-up bookkeeping service for books that have already drifted.

Since April 2022 every VAT-registered UK business has had to keep digital records and file through Making Tax Digital compatible software, which means the ledger is the filing. A spreadsheet retyped into a portal each quarter does not meet the digital-links requirement. That is one reason we work inside Xero, QuickBooks Online or FreeAgent rather than a system of our own: your records stay in your subscription, under your login, MTD-ready.

A worked example. An agency with 12 staff, 380 transactions a month and two currencies takes roughly six hours of processing across the month and two hours at close. Of those eight hours, about 70 minutes is genuine judgement: which supplier invoice is a prepayment, which Stripe payout covers which sales week, whether a director expense is allowable. The rest is rules and matching, which is the part that automation handles well. We price the whole block as a fixed monthly fee, so you can see our fixed-fee pricing before you commit.

What gets reconciled every month, without exception:

• Every bank and credit card account, to the statement, not to the feed.
• Merchant and payment processor clearing accounts (Stripe, PayPal, GoCardless, Shopify Payments).
• Accounts receivable and accounts payable control accounts, back to the aged listings.
• VAT or sales tax control, so the VAT and tax compliance service starts from a reconciled number.
• Payroll control and PAYE liability, agreed to the payroll journal.
• Loans, leases and directors loan accounts, with the interest split out.
• Stock, prepayments, accruals and deferred revenue.

That reconciled ledger is what makes monthly management accounts worth reading, and it is what an owner-managed business needs before any of the small business accounting conversations about margin or headcount are worth having. If you want the detail on which parts we automate and which parts stay human, we wrote it up in our review of AI bookkeeping tools. Bookkeeping is the base layer for everything else in our full accounting and tax service list, from VAT filing to board reporting. Longer write-ups on the tooling and the filings sit on the Accountaire blog.