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Pilot customer here; they are amazing. It's pretty different from a regular bookkeeper largely in that Pilot is super accurate and timely. My time spent doing b
by adam_gyroscope 9y ago
Pilot customer here; they are amazing. It's pretty different from a regular bookkeeper largely in that Pilot is super accurate and timely. My time spent doing bookkeeping for my small startup went from an hour or two a week to zero hours a week - those are pretty important hours. Highly recommended.
- andruby 9y agoCan you explain how it saves those hours? Do you no longer have to input invoices and expenses? Is that all automated?
- adam_gyroscope 9y agoYep - all of that is automated. Importantly, all the the classification of the transactions is automated as well, so I no longer have to look at a charge like "GUS99PWR-T BILL.COM" on my credit card statement and figure out a) where it is from and b) that it should be categorized as a marketing/promotional expense.
- adam_gyroscope 9y agoOh, and I get a report every month with all my reports (balance sheet, P&L, etc) and summary data, and they do amazing customer support.
- MarkMc 9y agoHow do they know that "GUS99PWR-T BILL.COM" is a marketing expense? Do they use the fact that other users have previously classified "GUS99PWR-T BILL.COM" as 'Marketing'?
- wdaher 9y agoThe first time we see something totally unknown to us, just like a normal human bookkeeper, we'll have to ask you about it (assuming there isn't metadata somewhere else that helps us categorize it). But then once you've told us, unlike a normal human bookkeeper, we won't forget about it later — we'll actually encode a rule in our software that will enforce this check going forward. (And yes, you also do benefit from "If our system has seen this type of transaction somewhere else, we can make a more intelligent guess")
- enraged_camel 9y agoSo let's say I have a $29.99 expense from AMAZON.COM and tag it as a marketing expense. Then I buy something else from Amazon tomorrow for $44.99. Are you telling me that it gets automatically tagged as marketing? Because that seems... naive at best, and hugely problematic at worst (as it can result in a huge amount of expenses getting incorrectly tagged).
- wdaher 9y agoThis is exactly why the human is in the loop and why the solution isn't purely software — to help come up with processes and mechanisms for resolving this sort of ambiguity. (Every outsourced bookkeeper today has this challenge, and there are a variety of options for resolving it, depending on what the customer requires.)
- ckeck 9y agoExactly what I came to ask, because I have at least a handful of vendors (perhaps more) that I have to key in across multiple categories. Rules cannot be applied to these transactions. For the obvious ones, I already have automatic rules build right into QuickBooks Online. What is different here?
- fma 9y agoMy guess...they use quickbooks in the background, which allows you to upload receipts. If the description of your amazon receipt looks like furniture, then they'll mark it as such...if it looks like office supplies...office supplies. I use Wave, which lets you upload receipts and it will perform OCR to extract vendor info, date, total cost. It's not much of a leap to go 1 step further and look at the line items and categorize...again just a guess.
- ebcase 9y ago@wdaher does Pilot help with invoicing? e.g. preparing and sending invoices, reconciling, etc?
- 9y ago
- shafyy 9y agoWe're also using it and I can only recommend it :-)