Watch the demo  ·  Quickstart  ·  How it works  ·  Your data  ·  Known issues

Autonomous Accounting turns a pile of receipts, invoices and bank statements into a reconciled, categorized ledger — plus an audit binder with every source document attached. A vision LLM you choose reads the documents, a four-pass matcher pairs them with your bank lines, and anything it is not sure of is flagged for you instead of guessed. Everything runs on one machine you own: no account to create, no vendor to pay, no copy of your books anywhere but your own disk.

See it work

Two minutes twenty: one invented company's January, from eight documents and a bank CSV to a downloadable audit binder.

Watch the full demo (2:20, captioned, no sound)

_{Everything shown is synthetic. python scripts/gen_demo_data.py writes the same month on your machine — see Try the demo month.}

What you get

A review queue, not a black box. Exact pairs approve themselves; date gaps and cross-currency pairs wait for you.	A ledger with CRA/GIFI categories. Monthly and annual, with a GST/HST/PST summary and QuickBooks- and Xero-style CSVs.	An audit binder in one ZIP. The XLSX workbook, a self-contained HTML report, and the document behind every line.

How it works

• Extraction. Receipts, invoices and PDF bank statements are rasterised and read by a vision LLM into structured JSON (vendor, date, amount, tax, currency), with totals cross-checked against line items. Uploads queue and answer 202; a background worker drains the queue, so dropping half a year of documents at once cannot time out, and a restart re-queues whatever was mid-flight.
• Reconciliation. Four passes over the unmatched set: strict same-currency, FX-relaxed inside a configurable band, an aggressive pass for splits and installments, and an LLM pass that links across accounts.
• Categorization. A deterministic regex pre-pass (config/category_rules.yaml) locks what it recognises, vendor clustering normalises descriptors, and only the remainder reaches the model, under a per-run call budget.
• Reports. Monthly and annual ledgers, a GST/HST/PST tax summary, a PDF report, QuickBooks- and Xero-style CSVs, a shareable read-only link, the ZIP audit binder — and an optional "reasonableness" pass that compares your expense ratios against published Canadian industry data.

Rules it does not break

• It flags; it does not guess. A wrong number in a tax filing is worse than a blank. Bank fees, interest and internal transfers are excluded rather than force-matched.
• It never sums across currencies. A USD invoice paid in CAD is an FX match for review, never an "exact" one.
• Your documents go only where you point them. Set LLM_BASE_URL to a server on your own machine or LAN and nothing leaves. An empty provider key means off; nothing silently falls back to a paid provider, and GET /health shows where an upload would go. If the endpoint is unreachable, jobs park in waiting_for_model and resume by themselves.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no webfonts. Loading a page fetches nothing from anyone else. The log files on your disk are the only record.
• Row-level security on every table, keyed on the signed-in user and enforced from the catalogue by a test.

The long form — backups, encryption at rest, what reaches a model — is in Honesty about data.

Quickstart

You need Python 3.11+, Node 20+, PostgreSQL 15+ on loopback, and any OpenAI-compatible, vision-capable endpoint — vLLM, llama.cpp, Ollama's /v1, LM Studio. This project hosts no model of its own.

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate    # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env                            # then fill in the three values it names

createdb autonomous_accounting                  # the order below is not interchangeable
psql -d autonomous_accounting -f db/local_auth_schema.sql
psql -d autonomous_accounting -f db/schema_pg.sql
python -m db.migrate
psql -d autonomous_accounting -f db/local_grants.sql

npm --prefix web ci && npm --prefix web run build
python -m uvicorn server.app:app --port 8080    # then open http://localhost:8080

Registration is closed by default. Set AUTH_ALLOW_SIGNUP=1, restart, sign up, then set it back to 0. GET /health reports database, storage and LLM reachability.

python -c "import secrets;print(secrets.token_urlsafe(48))"   # AUTH_JWT_SECRET
python -c "import secrets;print(secrets.token_urlsafe(48))"   # STORAGE_URL_SECRET

cd web
npm ci
npm run dev            # http://localhost:5174

python scripts/ingest_ised_benchmarks.py --year 2024 --out config/ised_benchmarks.json

Try the demo month

The files under tests/fixtures/ are per-parser unit fixtures; uploaded through the UI they match nothing, because no receipt among them belongs to any bank line. To see the whole pipeline work, generate a coherent synthetic month instead:

python scripts/gen_demo_data.py          # writes data/demo/, which is gitignored

That writes one invented company's January 2026 — a 12-row CAD statement in the built-in CSV layout, seven PDFs and one PNG — plus a README.txt saying what each file is there to show. Then, in the app:

1. Set OWN_COMPANY_PATTERNS=example corp in .env and restart, so the invoice issued by the demo company is read as income and can match the incoming wire.
2. Sign up, choose Manitoba as the province (the demo documents charge GST and RST), and upload demo_bank_cad.csv as the statement.
3. Upload all eight documents at once. They queue; each takes roughly a minute on a 27B-class local vision model, less on a hosted one.
4. Press Match Receipts. Expect exact same-day pairs to be auto-approved without a model call, a six-day date gap and a USD invoice paid in CAD to land in Review, the monthly fee, interest and inter-account transfer to be marked as needing no receipt, two bank lines left asking for a document, and a cash receipt left unmatched.
5. Approve the pending pairs in Review, then download the audit binder from Reports → January 2026 and open proof_of_transaction/ and index.html.

What that run looks like on one model is written up under Verification gaps in docs/backlog.md, next to the defects it found.

What it is not

• Not a hosted service. Nothing to sign up for. You run it or it does not run.
• Not something you buy. The software takes no payment. Every signed-in account has full access to every feature.
• Not supported. No warranty, no SLA, no security response commitment, no promise that an upgrade will not want a manual migration. See the licence.
• Not a filing service. It produces a ledger and reports for a Canadian small corporation, and models GST/HST/PST only. It files nothing with the CRA and it is not accounting advice. Check the numbers before you use them.

Architecture

Go deeper

One thing a stranger will meet early: Gmail's OAuth redirect has to match what you registered. The code builds <BASE_URL>/api/onboarding/gmail/callback, and BASE_URL defaults to http://localhost:8080. If you serve the app anywhere else, set BASE_URL (or GMAIL_REDIRECT_URI) before connecting Gmail, and register the same value with Google. Gmail, PayPal and Wise gather integrations stay hidden until you configure credentials.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md: synthetic fixtures only, ruff and tsc clean, one topic per pull request, sign off your commits (git commit -s). The most useful contribution is a statement parser or a category rule for a layout the engine does not read yet — built from invented data, never real books.

If this saved you a bookkeeping afternoon, a star helps the next small-business owner find it.

Licence

Autonomous Accounting — self-hosted bookkeeping with LLM document extraction and bank reconciliation. Copyright (C) 2026 Autonomous Accounting contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Full text in LICENSE. Because this is the AGPL, running a modified version as a network service obliges you to offer its source to its users. Third-party attributions — including PyMuPDF, itself AGPL — are in NOTICE.