Bookkeeping Automated: From Roughly 60 to 15 Hours a Month

Before we tell clients what automation can do, we hold up our own numbers: our bookkeeping looked like it does in any business. Receipts sat in email attachments and portals, someone downloaded, typed, matched – and at month's end went hunting for the payment a receipt belonged to. On top of that: billing and invoicing, every month again.

Without automation, our estimate is roughly 60 hours a month – more than a full working week, tied up in work that follows fixed rules:

The biggest challenges

• Collecting receipts from emails and portals
• Typing in data by hand
• Matching every receipt to the right bank transaction
• Untangling transfers between accounts at month's end
• Billing and invoicing done manually
• Questions like "Is a receipt missing here?" – every time a search instead of an answer

The centre is SevDesk – around it, an automation that takes over the grunt work:

The building blocks

• Receipts extracted from emails automatically: when an invoice arrives by email, the receipt in the attachment is detected and read out – amount, date, sender.
• Created as a receipt in SevDesk: no downloading, no typing.
• Linked to the matching transaction: receipt and bank movement find each other automatically.
• Transfers recognized automatically: movements between our own accounts are detected and linked – the classic that otherwise produces question marks on the bank statement.
• A bookkeeping agent as the answers layer: in Langdock, we built our own AI agent with access to SevDesk, our bank account and our email inbox, trained on tax-advisory and bookkeeping content. Questions like "Is there a receipt for this payment?" it answers straight from the real data. Decisions stay with a human – binding tax advice still comes only from the tax advisor.

Around 90% of the bookkeeping now runs fully automated. An estimated 60 hours a month became about 15 – around 45 hours back, minus 75%. More than a full working week, every month.

The numbers

• From roughly 60 to about 15 hours of bookkeeping per month
• Around 45 hours back every month – minus 75%
• Receipts flow automatically from email to linked transaction – zero typed by hand
• Account transfers recognized and linked automatically
• The bookkeeping agent answers questions straight from the real data

And the final 10%? Deliberately not automated. Edge cases – a receipt without a clean attachment, an unusual transaction – and regular human review. Filing stays compliant (GoBD), and the tax advisor stays: automation prepares, it doesn't replace tax advice. For context: these are our own books – our receipt volume, our processes. What's possible in your business depends on your systems and can be assessed honestly up front.