13,000 Xero lines checked, and a finance team that finally reaches its own data
A London medtech start-up’s head of finance used Claude daily, but in their setup it couldn’t open Xero’s receipts or reach the bank. We checked every Xero line, then automated the month-end reports.
- 13,000
- Xero lines checked for receipt, VAT code and account, in one run
- 2–3 h
- to set up the check
- ≈ 2 weeks
- of manual review saved (our estimate)
One ledger line, three checks
Every Xero line
- Office rent, September
- Hotel, client visit
- Packaging, invoice 118
- Is the right receipt attached?
- Does the VAT code match the document?
- Is it booked to the right account?
Only the lines that need a person, each with its evidence, in a spreadsheet
Illustrative lines; the checks are the real ones. Logos are trademarks of their owners.
× 13,000 lines, one run
The situation
The company develops a medical device in London and is backed by a seed round. Finance was run by a head of finance from a Big Four background, not by an engineer.
Claude was already part of the daily routine, but it couldn’t reach the company’s data. There was no connector for Revolut Business, and in their setup the Xero connector was locked by the organisation and didn’t give access to the receipts attached to each transaction. So the checks that mattered were done by hand, or not at all.
What we did
The books check
One check went through 13,000 Xero lines and asked three questions of each: is the right receipt attached, does the VAT code match the document, is it booked to the right account? Setting it up took 2–3 hours. It listed only the lines that needed a person, each with its evidence, in a spreadsheet ready to work through.
By our estimate, it replaced about two weeks of manual review. That is our figure, not the client’s, and it was one run on a backlog, not a monthly saving.
Month-end reports that build themselves
The month-end Excel reports are now generated automatically, in the exact format the team already used. Nothing new to learn: the same file, without the copy-paste.
A purchase-order flow
Purchasing was handled by hand, and no off-the-shelf tool fitted the way a medtech buys components. We built one around their actual approval chain.
How it runs
Everything runs in the company’s own cloud account, which it owns and pays for. Next on the same setup: tracing which components go into each device on the production line.