What vibe coding is good at
Dashboards, scripts and one-off analysis. Pulling transactions from an API, grouping spend by vendor, charting MRR, drafting a model of next year’s hiring. These are reads: if the chart is a little off, you notice and fix it, and nothing downstream depends on it.
Where it breaks
Accounting is writes, and the writes have rules. A generated categorizer doesn’t know that every entry must balance, that a posted month shouldn’t change, that an annual prepayment is an asset and not an expense, or that a Stripe payout is charges minus fees minus refunds, and not all of those charges are revenue yet. Floating-point sums drift by cents. A customer refund for a closed month gets edited into that month instead of booked in the open one. Each mistake is small; none is visible on a dashboard; all of them surface in diligence.
A concrete one. A script books a $12,000 annual prepayment from a customer as January revenue because that’s when the cash arrived. The chart shows a record January. Under US GAAP January earned $1,000, and the other $11,000 is a liability until the service is delivered. Nothing errored; the code did exactly what it was asked, and the P&L is wrong by $11,000 for the month.
- Double entry: debits equal credits on every entry, enforced, not hoped for.
- Period locks: closed months stay closed; mistakes are corrected with entries in the open month.
- Schedules: prepaids, deferred revenue, depreciation and leases released by a rule, not by hand.
- Reconciliation: every account ties to something outside the books.
- A reviewer: someone qualified who signs that it’s right.
Reads
A little off, and you notice.
- Dashboards and charts
- Grouping spend by vendor
- MRR and burn
- A model of next year’s hiring
Writes
A little off, and it surfaces in diligence.
- Every entry balances
- Closed months stay closed
- Schedules released by a rule
- Every account ties outside
- A qualified reviewer signs
0.1 + 0.20.3000000000000000410 + 20 // cents30The middle path
Let AI do the volume (categorizing, matching, drafting entries, running schedules), but inside a structure that enforces the rules above and stops to ask when it isn’t sure. Keep a human approval on anything that posts, and have a CPA review the result on a schedule. That’s the model this site is built around.
Common questions
Can ChatGPT or Claude do my bookkeeping?
A general-purpose model can categorize transactions and explain accounting concepts well. On its own it doesn’t keep a ledger: it won’t enforce balancing entries, lock periods, reconcile to your bank or keep an audit trail. Those have to come from the system it runs inside, plus a human review.
Is AI bookkeeping accurate enough for investors?
It can be, if the output is reconciled, follows US GAAP, and is reviewed by a qualified accountant. Investors don’t care how a transaction was categorized; they care whether the statements tie and whether someone accountable stands behind them.
Why should money be stored as integers in code?
Because binary floating point can’t represent most decimal fractions exactly: in JavaScript, 0.1 + 0.2 is 0.30000000000000004. Summed across thousands of rows and rounded in different places, those slivers turn into a cent that won’t reconcile. Storing whole cents as integers, with the currency alongside, and rounding once at the end avoids the whole class of error. Currencies don’t all have two decimals, either: yen has none.
What should a human approve before it hits the books?
Anything that posts: a new journal entry, a schedule, a reclassification, a change to a closed month (which should be a new entry in the open one). Categorizing a coffee receipt can run unattended if a person reviews the exceptions. A judgment, such as how to recognize a new kind of contract, should never run unattended.
Terms in this guide
Each one has its own page in the founder glossary. Hover for the short version, or open the full entry.
Keep going
From here: a free tool to try it on your own numbers, the lesson behind it, the software it names and the state guides that cite it.
- Free toolPrepaid & deferred releaseA premium paid on the 17th does not release in twelve equal slices. Day-weighted, or even — your call.
- Free toolJournal entry balancerPaste an entry, see the out-of-balance, and copy an import-ready CSV.
- Lesson 9 · 12 minAdjusting entriesThree entries nobody sends an invoice for, made on the last day of the month, that turn a record of transactions into a set of accounts.
- In your booksStripe in your booksCard payments and subscription billing for most software startups.
- In your booksCursor in your booksAn AI code editor, and how a lot of founder finance scripts get written.
- State guidesFederal accounting for startupsFederal law sets the tax rules, not the bookkeeping ones: US GAAP comes from the FASB and from what investors expect, while Form 1120, the cash-method test and Section 174 come from the IRS. Every state builds its corporate tax on this return.
Want this handled without thinking about it?
Lopifi is building AI bookkeeping that keeps your books closed on US GAAP as transactions happen, watches deadlines like the ones above, and has a CPA review everything each quarter, for $200 a month. We’re not open yet.
More founder guides
- FundraisingAudit-ready books before your Series AInvestors, lenders and auditors ask for the same things: accrual statements, reconciled accounts and support for every balance. How to be ready first.
- RevenueDeferred revenue for SaaS startups, explainedAn annual prepayment is cash today and revenue over a year. How deferred revenue works under ASC 606, why it’s a liability, and the schedule behind it.
- The closeWhy startups should close their books every monthA monthly close turns a bank balance into numbers an investor, an auditor or a 409A firm will accept. What it is, and why it gets expensive to skip.
- StripeHow to reconcile Stripe payouts to your booksA Stripe payout is charges less fees, refunds and disputes, batched across days. How to book it gross, tie it to the bank, and keep revenue right.
General information for US companies, not tax, legal or accounting advice for yours. Rules and thresholds change; confirm the specifics with a CPA before you act on them.