What Augustine needs to get started: a QuickBooks or Xero export and two hours

Getting started should be cheap and easy to stop. This note says exactly what it asks of you, what happens to what you send, and what you get back, so you can decide before you write to us.

What you bring

• An accounting export. Your bills list and your invoices list, exported from QuickBooks Online or Xero as CSV or XLSX. We ask your home currency and whether your dates are written month first or day first, because a date that could be read two ways is not read until you say.
• A few documents. The ones that describe what is at stake in your operation: a supplier contract summary, a budget-versus-actual report, a list of your sites, shipping routes and suppliers. Text, CSV, PDF, Word and Excel are read. A scanned PDF with no text layer is refused by name, not indexed empty.
• Two hours over two weeks. From the person who owns payables or planning, so the questions being answered are the ones your team really asks.

What happens to your data

The export is a file, not a connection. QuickBooks Online and Xero are never contacted. The file is read once, converted into one standard format, and not stored. Rows that cannot be carried, such as a voided invoice or a date that cannot be read, are dropped, and each drop names its reason.

Your documents go into a workspace that holds your documents and no other company's. You get an invitation email and set your own password, which we never see or hold. Your data is never used to train models.

Nothing is written to any system of yours without a named person approving each item. Before anyone is asked to approve, the text is checked against your records, and a sentence that states a figure your records do not carry is refused with the sentence named.

What you see

• Standing finance questions answered from your own documents, each with the passage it came from, or a plain statement that your documents do not carry the answer.
• Your suppliers, sites, shipping routes and contracts in one list, imported from the list you bring.
• Every draft marked as drafted with Augustine and reviewed by a named person before any action.

How it ends

Fourteen days, on a date stated at the start. It can end earlier whenever you ask, and sign-in stops on the day access ends. Removing your documents afterwards is a manual step today: we remove them by hand and confirm to you in writing when it is done.

What this is not

It is not a live connection to QuickBooks Online, Xero, or any other accounting system. It is not a claim about accuracy on your data: the numbers on this site come from practice data, and no real company's books have run through Augustine yet. What we learn about your documents, we learn with you as we go.

It starts with a conversation. If that is a fair trade for two hours, book a demo.