JournalRelay does the bookkeeping prep on your year-end files, shoeboxes included. Your team does the review and signs.
The back office behind your firm. Not another tool your team has to run, and never a competitor for your clients.
Back to the cent, with every fix written out for your partner. Nothing goes to suspense.
Hand us your worst fileAI reasoning No invoice matches. Same payee as two earlier owner draws. Could be a loan repayment or a draw, so a person decides and the client gets one question.
Nothing posts until a person on our team approves it. Low-confidence lines come with the AI's reasoning attached.
Counted from our own ledger. Nothing here is a projection.
A file that takes a senior three days and bills for one. A ledger that's "reconciled" until someone opens it. It lands on your partners in March and on your CFOs every month-end.
You can't bill for all of it, you can't hire for it in time, and you can't turn it away without losing the client.
You buy seats, learn the tool and your staff do the work in it. The capacity problem moves; it doesn't go away.
A new kind of firm that sells bookkeeping straight to business owners. Useful for them, and a competitor for you.
Our team preps the file and hands it to yours. The client stays yours, and the work can go out under your firm's name.
| Hire a junior | Offshore bookkeeper | AI software | JournalRelay | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Your team, once trained | Their staff | Your team, inside the tool | Our team and agents. Yours reviews |
| Ready for busy season | If you hired in time | Depends on their queue | Limited by your team's hours | Turnaround agreed up front |
| Review trail | Whatever they document | Varies | Logged in the tool | Every entry traced to source, with a confidence score and reasoning |
| The client relationship | Stays yours | Stays yours | Stays yours | Stays yours, and the work can go out under your name |
| How you pay | Salary, all year | Hourly or per client | Per seat, every month | Per file, when it's delivered |
Send last year's file and this year's records. Before we start, we find what's missing and write the client one question list. Then we work the way your firm does.
Three ways inWith the access you give us. No migration, and the client keeps their software.
Exports in; coding sheets and validated journals out. You post them, and we check the result against a fresh export.
We rebuilt a crane-hire company's year this way, from bank, factoring and settlement statements, with no login to its ledger.
Statements, receipts and invoices, coded to the client's chart of accounts (GIFI in Canada), with sales tax split out.
Out comes the same thing every time: a year-end file for CPA firms or a monthly close package for CFO firms.
Every name here comes from client work we have done. Not on the list? If it exports a CSV or a PDF statement, we can work from it.
Working papers tied to source, proposed AJEs with a decision memo, financial statements, a CaseWare file and the tax workings.
Catch-up of past months, takeover from a previous accountant, and a review of the ledger you inherited, so problems surface before you sign anything.
Bank and card recs, accruals, sales tax tie-out, financials and an open-items list. We chase the client for missing receipts; the relationship stays yours. Typically by business day 5 for owner-run businesses; for more complex clients we agree the date up front.
Every job runs on a skill: written instructions for our agents, deterministic tools, a test set of files we've already reviewed, and a person at the gate.
Every bank and card account reconciled to statement, with nothing pushed to suspense.
Advances, rebates, escrow, fees and interest from an invoice-finance facility, journaled every month.
The fortnight's master timesheet checked before the pay run, line by line.
Books taken over from someone else, tied out before anything new is posted.
A filed corporate return turned into GIFI-coded opening balances.
A second agent re-derives every figure from source before a person signs off.
Take the whole engagement, or just the parts that eat your seniors' time.
On the first file we write the client's coding rulebook and payee map, along with your firm's house rules. Every later month starts from it, and every fix you make goes back into it. Month 12 comes back faster and closer to your style than month 1.
Three jobs, three files, from two firms in Canada and Australia. Client and firm names are left out.
A CPA firm sent us a year-end file for an owner-managed business. The ledger was described as reconciled and the prior year had been filed. They asked for the whole engagement: tie-outs, review pass, adjusting entries, statements, the CaseWare file and the tax workings.
An Amazon, Shopify and wholesale brand arriving with someone else's ledger: the file a CPA firm inherits with a new client, or a CFO firm onboards. We tied the prior year-end first, then swept all 16 bank and card accounts, reviewed the old journals and caught the current year up.
ResultEvery balance tied to the ledger, so year-end could start. The three accounts that didn't balance were explained, not plugged.
Real-time bank reconciliation and a month-end close for an electrical contractor trading under a DOCA, with an invoice-finance facility. Advances, rebates, escrow and fees are journaled every month, and every journal file is validated before import.
ResultThe full-year bank feed ties to the closing balance to the cent, and each month's finance journals import cleanly.
That's the work we'd like to take off your desk, starting with one file.
Send us one fileEvery industry has its own hard part. These are the ones we've already worked through on real files.
No. AI proposes each entry and a person on our team approves it. Our engine does the math, and nothing posts unless it balances. A second agent then re-ties every balance from source. On one year-end close it rejected our own first pass: the bank statements tied, but the general ledger didn't. The second pass found payroll transfers that had never been booked and withholding that hadn't been remitted, and the firm saw each fix before anything was posted.
No. We work inside their Xero or QuickBooks file, or build the books in our own ledger when there's nothing to start from.
Client files are stored on Google Cloud, and the AI step runs on Google's Gemini models. If your clients' data has to stay in a particular country, tell us up front and we'll agree the hosting setup for your firm before any files move. We sign a confidentiality agreement before you send anything, and we'll put our data handling in writing for your engagement file.
We prepare the sales tax workings (GST/HST returns in Canada). Income tax returns stay with your firm. In Canada the books arrive GIFI-coded, so they import cleanly into the T2.
Only if you want us to. Some firms have us chase missing receipts directly; others keep every client conversation themselves.
Pick one file that's been sitting on someone's desk: a shoebox, a messy ledger, a year that won't tie out. We agree the fee before we start, sign a confidentiality agreement and deliver the prep, and you decide from there whether to send more.
Your firm does. We prepare the file and your partner reviews and signs it. JournalRelay never signs an engagement or files an income tax return.
Tell us early how many files you expect. We agree turnaround times with you up front, the same way we agree the fee, so files don't queue up behind other firms' work in March.
Yes. We bring the history up to date first, then run the monthly close from there.
One file, one fee, agreed before we start.
Rohan Ahmed · Platform Calgary