The worry: AI gets things wrong and nobody notices
You'll read that AI sorts transactions with 85 to 95% accuracy, and that the other 5 to 15% piles up quietly until your accountant charges you to untangle it. That's a fair worry about software that guesses and moves on.
SumSwift is built the other way around. It doesn't guess when it isn't sure. It asks you, and it checks everything it can against your bank.
How SumSwift checks itself
- Every statement is checked against the opening and closing balances your bank printed on it, to the cent. If a single line is missing or read wrong, the statement shows "Off by" the exact amount.
- Missing months are flagged, so a gap can't hide in your books.
- Anything it isn't confident about goes to you as a question instead of a guess. One answer covers every charge from the same place, and it remembers next time.
- A month can't be locked until every account balances and every question is answered.
- Every change is recorded: who changed what, and when. Your accountant can see it.
What our tests found
We test SumSwift on sets of statements built to look like real Canadian banks' (RBC, CIBC and others, as PDFs and CSV downloads) with the messy things real businesses do, plus real statements from our own accounts. In our latest runs, across more than 3,000 transactions: every line was read, every statement with printed balances matched them to the cent, every transaction ended up in the right category, and none was sorted wrong without SumSwift asking about it first.
In the first month, SumSwift asks about roughly 15 to 20% of transactions, mostly charges that could be personal or business. That drops quickly, because it remembers your answers.
One of those tests is a business owner's own messy QuickBooks with 13 kinds of mistakes planted in it (card payments counted as income, duplicates, personal spending as business, GST left in sales). SumSwift found all 13, and its profit came within 4 cents of the true number. The owner's books were off by more than $150,000.
These are our tests, not yet thousands of customers. We'll publish real numbers as businesses use it.
The things software supposedly can't do
- Personal spending on the business card: there's a Personal category, whole accounts can be marked personal, and anything that might be personal is asked about, not assumed.
- Equipment: a big purchase that might be a computer, tool or vehicle gets a question, so it's written off over the years instead of all at once.
- Double charges and missing statements: double charges are caught and SumSwift writes the refund email for you. A gap between statements is flagged.
- "Profitable but out of cash": the monthly plain-English summary, the 90-day cash forecast and Ask Swift explain your numbers in plain words.
- Tax time: a year-end package with a trial balance that balances, the full ledger, a list of anything still open, and every receipt. Your accountant gets free access to look or make fixes, and a QuickBooks export if they want one.
What still needs a person
You, a few minutes a month, to answer the questions SumSwift asks. Your accountant for advice and for filing your tax returns: SumSwift works out estimates and prepares the numbers, but it doesn't give tax advice or file your income tax return. SumSwift works out payroll each payday, but you send the pay and the remittances from your own bank, and pay your bills yourself; doing those for you is coming through licensed partners.
If you want someone to talk to about strategy, keep your accountant. They'll spend their time on advice instead of sorting transactions, which is what you'd rather pay them for anyway.