Including the ones with awkward answers

No. Hand it something you already have — a registration certificate, last month's invoice, a price list, or your website — and it reads that and sets the place up around it. Nothing is saved until you have seen what it found. Most businesses start with quotes and invoices and bring the books across at the next month-end.

Yes. Old invoices import as documents and post to the books on the date they were actually raised, so your comparatives are real rather than starting from zero. Opening balances come in as a trial balance pasted straight out of the old system, and it tells you line by line where the two sets of books disagree before you commit to anything.

You see what it found before anything is written. Every field it extracted from a document is labelled as read or guessed, and the guessed ones are the ones it asks you to check. Reading a supplier name off a photographed slip is right about two times in three — a product that hides that is one that quietly pays the wrong supplier.

A quote can be out in about ten minutes. The books are useful from the first month you close. The agent is useful once it has enough of your own trading to say anything about it — which for most businesses is a few weeks, and it will tell you when it does not have enough rather than guessing.

Because a team of ten should not be running the assistant on one person's account, which is what every flat plan quietly becomes. Seats are cheap and the entry plan includes three.

No. Portal seats are unlimited and free. Your customer viewing what they owe, accepting a quote or paying an invoice does not cost you anything — charging for that would be charging you for getting paid.

It is included. There is a monthly allowance per seat and the console shows what has been used. Heavy unattended work — overnight sweeps across a large ledger — is where an allowance runs out, and you are told before it does rather than after.

A second workspace, and the two can be grouped so you can see what the whole thing earned once the trading between them is taken out. Group consolidation is on the Business plan upwards.

It has two limits you set — the most it may move in one action, and the most it may move in a day — and both are empty when you start. Empty means it moves no money without being asked. A per-action limit on its own bounds nothing, because a hundred payments just under it pass one at a time, which is why the daily figure exists.

It can be wrong, like any such system. What it cannot do is tell you it did something it did not do: every action it reports is checked against the records before it is shown to you. And when a question is outside what it can answer from your own books, it says so rather than producing a confident paragraph.

No. Your documents, messages and figures are yours. Where something genuinely benefits from more than one business — a price benchmark, for instance — it is a number and never a name, and your workspace has to opt in before it either contributes or draws on it.

It drafts, and by default you see the wording before it goes. You can let it send on its own once you trust a particular kind of message. It will not open a collections sequence with a lawyer's letter to a customer you want to keep.

No. Which tables may be pooled is written down by name and two of them never can be — WhatsApp threads and inbound messages. Every query that reads a workspace-owned table is checked by a test that counts the ones which do not scope to a workspace, and that number has only ever been allowed to fall.

That depends on the deployment, and the product will tell you rather than guess. Several countries restrict moving personal information across their borders, so a deployment that cannot answer the question refuses to make the promise instead of making one it cannot keep.

Yes, and you are offered a copy of your records on the way out. We do not run a one-click export wizard, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. Your books are your books — most tax authorities require invoices to be kept for five years or longer, so that obligation outlives us either way.

Every quote and invoice carries a code and a short address. Opening it shows the document as you issued it — your official details, the amount, the number and where it stands — and a customer who is unsure can ask you to confirm it before paying. When somebody compares an account they were given and it is not yours, you are told at once.

Support cannot read a workspace without it being recorded. Every sensitive operation writes an audit entry at the ledger rather than at the call site, which is the difference between a rule somebody remembers and a rule nobody can forget.

They get a login, and there is a console built for a practice: every client they look after, which books have filings past their date, which have unmatched bank lines, and which have had no month closed in a year. Most prefer it to the shoebox.

Yes. Every invoice, payment, expense and payslip posts to a ledger that balances, with a trial balance, a general ledger and aged analysis that come out of the entries rather than being assembled. The tax return is a report, not a reconstruction.

No, and that is the point. Reopening one is possible, recorded, and requires a reason — because a month that can be silently edited is a month no auditor can rely on.

There is a page that answers the four things an auditor asks for: the run of document numbers with any gaps named, whether the invoices would pass a structured-invoicing mandate, the tie-out against whatever system you came from, and the audit file itself as a download.

Twenty-two countries have a pack of their own: the tax and how it is filed, the filing calendar, and the local providers worth connecting. Payroll is worked out here in South Africa and Malawi. In Kenya the contributions are worked out and income tax is not, because its bands have not been confirmed, and in Nigeria nothing is worked out until the current table is in hand — payroll refuses a figure it cannot stand behind rather than inventing one. Elsewhere payroll is a bureau's or a payroll provider's job, and the pack says which. A country without a pack gets the universal one: a working product, without the local providers.

Nineteen trades have a page of their own on this site — what goes wrong in each, what skynat.ai does about it, and what to choose when you sign up. Every other business runs on the same engine, and nothing is switched off for anybody.

Capture does. A slip photographed with no network is held on the device and sent the moment there is one, and the retry cannot produce the same cost twice. The rest of the product needs a connection, because a cache that serves a stale invoice is worse than a page that will not load.

Quotes, invoices and statements go out on the number a customer already answers. An inbound message is matched against a closed list of ten instructions and nothing else — an inbound message is somebody else's text, and the only safe thing to do with somebody else's text is check it against a list.

Cash on delivery, a rider's float and a credit book written at the counter are all first-class. The product does not assume there is a card on file, because most of this economy does not have one.

On a phone, add the site to your home screen from the browser and it opens like an app: full screen, with its own icon and shortcuts to a new quote, today's work and photographing a slip. An Android app and a desktop app for Mac and Windows are built, and are not yet offered for download.

On whatever your computer can print to. You say once which printers the business has and the paper in each — A4 or US Letter, an 80 mm or a 58 mm receipt roll, a sheet or a roll of labels — and every document, receipt and label is laid out for it. In a browser the print window still picks the printer.