Your books, always up to date. Without the back-and-forth.

I’ll be honest, bookkeeping is the part of running a company that most founders (myself included, at various points) just sort of… defer. It’s never urgent until it suddenly is. And by urgent, I mean it’s 11 pm the night before your accountant needs it.

Receipts are in three places. Invoices are in two inboxes. And as an early-stage startup founder, you’re the one who has to fix it, because often there’s no one else who can.

Why it keeps happening

The problem isn’t discipline. It’s structure. Bookkeeping is a genuinely tedious task to do well because the information lives in too many tools, and none of them talk to each other all that well.

Invoices arrive in your inbox, your co-founder’s inbox, accounts@, finance@, and hardest of all, your teammates’ inboxes. Transactions happen across multiple accounts. Receipts get forwarded, forgotten, or found three weeks later in a downloads folder. And Xero, where it all needs to end up, requires someone to manually match receipts to transactions, assign account codes and tax rates, and finally, reconcile everything.

The part that actually kills you isn’t the reconciliation. It’s the chase. Your accountant has no visibility into who did what transaction a month ago, so everything comes back to you. A new vendor appears on the statement, and suddenly you’re digging through old Slack threads trying to remember what that £340 charge was for. Multiply that by every unfamiliar transaction in a busy month, and you’ve got hours of back-and-forth that nobody budgeted for.

At my last startup, my co-founder and I had a Slack channel literally called #invoices, where we'd dump everything flagged in the dreaded "exceptions report" and grind through them one by one. Just the way I wanted to spend my Friday afternoons.

Why we built Bookkeeping this way

We built bookkeeping into Seapoint because a financial home that doesn’t handle your books isn’t really a home - it’s just another tool to manage. The problem we kept hearing wasn’t that founders didn’t understand their books. It was that the evidence trail was broken. Transactions existed. Invoices existed. But connecting the two - consistently, in the right format, in Xero - required a manual process nobody had time to do well.

So the design principle became, the system finds the evidence, not the founder. Everything else follows. And honestly, watching founders use it for the first time, the moment they realise their accountant now just handles it, without the monthly chase, that’s still the part that makes me think we got it right. And, there’s more to come.

How Seapoint Bookkeeping works

Your transactions, ready to review.

When you open Bookkeeping, your Seapoint transactions are laid out in a simple table with two tabs: To do and Completed. Each transaction has a status that tells you exactly where things stand: needs review, awaiting approval, syncing to Xero, and synced. No guessing, no chasing. Just a clear queue of what still needs attention.

Invoices are extracted from Gmail, you confirm them.

When you connect relevant Gmail inboxes, Seapoint scans for invoices automatically. When it finds one that matches a transaction (by vendor, amount, date, and reference), it attaches it as suggested evidence. You confirm it’s correct, or swap it out if not. Non-invoice emails are never read or stored. The receipt hunt is over before it starts.

Prefer not to connect Gmail? You can attach evidence manually by uploading a file or dragging and dropping it onto the transaction row. After uploading, Seapoint scans the document and flags any details that don’t match the transaction, so you catch errors before they reach Xero.

Your accountant gets context, you save time.

Every transaction in Seapoint is automatically enriched. Seapoint finds the vendor’s website, pulls a short description of what they do, and shows exactly which email an invoice came from. That context sits alongside the transaction, visible to your accountant without them having to ask you anything.

From that enrichment, Seapoint suggests Xero categories based on your existing coding history (account codes, tax rates, tracking categories), so your accountant has everything they need to categorise and approve without a single back-and-forth. Each suggestion comes with a confidence level. High-confidence transactions can be filtered and bulk-approved in one go.

And for founders who like to work fast, there is full keyboard shortcut support. Tab through transactions, approve with a keypress, and move through your backlog without touching the mouse. It’s a small thing, but if you’re closing books at the end of a long month, you’ll feel it.

One click to Xero.

Approved transactions sync to Xero every ten minutes. Where evidence exists, Seapoint creates a reconciled bill in Xero with vendor, amount, account code, tax rate, and invoice attached. Where there’s no evidence, it creates a spend money transaction instead. Either way, your accountant sees it in Xero fully reconciled. There’s a direct link from the Seapoint transaction to the Xero bill if anyone needs to verify.

A note for accountants

If you’re an accountant, Seapoint customers can give you your own login with accountant-level access. You can see their every transaction, attach evidence, set categories, assign tax rates, and push directly to Xero - eliminating the need for back-and-forth emails. Month-end becomes a review process, not a data-gathering exercise.

The enrichment means you rarely need to chase the founder for context. And the confidence levels mean you can focus where it actually matters. High-confidence transactions awaiting approval can be bulk-approved in seconds. The ones that need review are flagged clearly. Seapoint is designed to fit around how accountants work, not to replace their expertise.

“I used to send my accountant a pile of transactions with half the receipts missing. Now everything’s matched and categorised before it gets to her. She just reviews and closes.”
 - Sam Brunt, Founder, Overmind

Learn more about Seapoint bookkeeping.