I'm Roman and I've been working on Billpal, a tool I built to do my bookkeeping for me.
Started as a personal thing, but I ended up building a product around it so others can use it too.
I'm a freelancer myself and always had a strong dislike for accounting, so I started to automate things bit by bit.
After testing a lot of accounting tools, I realized that a) they have many features I don’t need, and b) I was still faster using a spreadsheet.
So I built this tool to focus only on the essentials: finding invoices in my inbox and matching them to bank transactions.
What it does:
- Imports bank transactions via Open Banking APIs
- Collect invoices from the user’s inbox
- Using an IDP/OCR provider for document extraction
- Extracts basic info like date, supplier name, and line items, as well as specifics like whether it's reverse charge or various tax rates (e.g. from restaurants)
- Matches invoices to expenses based on params like amount, currency (FX conversion), and similarity to supplier names / line items (that's the only agentic part)
- Can also handle credit card statements (this part still needs improvement though)
- Users can then export a CSV with matched records
- Also built a whatsapp bot to make it super simple for users to upload receipts (photo or pdf)
Currently supports banks in the EU and UK, but planning to add US banks down the line.
Focusing on expenses right now but will also add income shortly (outgoing invoices from sent emails).
I would love to get your feedback on it. Check it out here: https://billpal.io
Cool software! Does this support the formats needed for German bookkeeping? Accounting fees are astronomical here so there is pent-up demand for a decent solution I reckon.
Thank you! Well, I built it in a way that the format is kinda universal – expenses are categorized but not with tax codes. Instead I am using labels like e.g. 'Cloud Infra & Hosting'. Plus apart from the basic infos I even extract things like reverse charge y/n or validate VAT IDs to make it as easy as possible for my tax advisor.
So it will not file your taxes for you but it prepares the raw data for your tax guy in a way that they have minimal effort and you can save quite substantially on the bookkeeping part. I'm in Austria and it is a bit cheaper here but also quite costly. Now I only pay for the tax filing, annual accounts and consulting when I need it.
I agree with you mostly but not 100%. It's definitely true that the way how you build it makes a product stand out - however the goal of this tool is more to understand WHAT to build as it gives you a glimpse into the opinions customers have about other (similar) products. The how is then onto the devs for sure.
Yes you are right if you know for instance Hubspot you do not need this application to tell you stuff about Hubspot you already know, it tells you how the audience perceives the product and the offering.
Data sources are various sites that have detailed reviews on software. We did not fine-tune anything yet as the initial goal is and was to validate the idea per se. We'll improve it further of course once we see there is a need for this.
Currently we have a quite basic RAG setup, no fine-tuning.
We wanted to get this out fast so decided to use Assistants API but definitely needs some polishing in this RAG pipeline (e.g. having more control over the exact search queries). For the MVP it was convenient as it all comes out of the box. Metadata filtering also better with Pinecone for instance.
That was exactly the reason we built this - to facilitate the gathering of this intel. Will it be a panacea for doing research - of course not.
But it can speed things up a bit and throws another (probably faster) research methodology into the mix.
I agree, there is a lot of opportunities you can find when looking at a subset of frustrated customers. Ironically they tell you in greater detail what they dislike vs the super happy customers on why they like something.
