How to catch up on six months of books with Ask Zera, step by step

 To catch up six months of books with Ask Zera in ZeraBooks, download every bank and card statement for those months as PDF or CSV, open Ask Zera with Cmd+J (Ctrl+J on Windows), drop the files in and type what you want in plain words. Ask Zera imports, checks, files, reconciles and closes. You answer a few questions and approve its cards.

I run ZeraBooks, so this is our own product. ZeraBooks is an AI-native general ledger, bank statement converter and done-for-you bookkeeping service for small businesses and accounting firms. Ask Zera is the agent inside the ledger, and Accounting Today covered its launch in Chris Gaetano's Oct 16 tech news roundup. Below is the whole job, with a fictional company so the numbers are concrete.

Our example: a made-up landscaping company

Birch & Stone Landscaping (not a real business) has four accounts: a business checking account, a savings account, a Visa and an Amex. Nobody has touched the books since the end of March. It's now early October, so April to September needs doing.

Step 1: Count your files before you download anything

Four accounts times six months is 24 statements. Ask Zera takes up to 20 files in one message, so plan on two messages: checking, savings and the Visa in the first (18 files), the Amex in the second (6 files). Keeping one account's statements together makes the second message easy to check.

Step 2: Download the real statements

Get the bank's own PDF or CSV for each month. Skip phone photos of paper statements. Ask Zera will ask for the bank's file instead, because it needs the printed balances to prove the month. Each file can be up to 14 MB, and statements up to 10 MB. If a year-long PDF is bigger, download it month by month.

If you have supplier bills, your own invoices, payroll reports or loan statements for those months, gather them too. They can go in the same messages.

Step 3: Open Ask Zera and send the first batch

Click the Ask Zera bar at the bottom of any page, or press Cmd+J. Drag the first 18 files onto the page and type it the way you'd say it, for example "catch me up April to September, Amex coming next". You don't need special wording.

A plan card appears at the top of the chat with each step and how many are done. Send the Amex statements in a second message whenever you like.

Step 4: Let it import, oldest first

Ask Zera works out which account each statement belongs to from the bank's name and the last four digits. If it can't tell, it asks. It imports the oldest month first so each statement can be checked against the one before it.

Each statement has to tie: its lines must take the printed opening balance to the printed closing balance, and its opening must equal last month's close. In our example, say the July Visa statement is off by $86.20. It still imports, but it's flagged, and July can't be signed off until that gap is explained.

Step 5: Answer the short list of questions

Ask Zera files the transactions it's sure of in batches, and pairs every payment from checking to a card as one transfer so it isn't counted twice. What's left comes back as a short numbered list. For Birch & Stone it might ask whether the $3,400 Home Depot charge in May was equipment or job materials, and whether the $500 Zelle payments every other Friday go to an employee or a contractor.

Answer in one line, in plain words. It remembers the answers for this company, so next month's catch-up asks fewer.

Step 6: Approve the cards, or let Auto-approve run

Every change is a card showing what changes, line by line. With Ask first, each waits for Approve or Skip, and Approve all takes every waiting card in order. With Auto-approve, the cards apply as Zera works. Either way every applied card keeps an Undo, and anything that can't be undone, like emailing a customer, still waits for your click.

Check which setting you're on before a big job. The pill sits beside New chat at the bottom of the chat.

Step 7: Let it chase the months that don't tie

Back to that July Visa gap. Ask Zera re-reads the statement, finds the cause, perhaps an $86.20 foreign transaction fee that was read as part of another line, and proposes the fix with the statement line quoted. Fixes to a statement's rows always wait for you.

Step 8: Sign off and close

When every account ties for every month, the sign-offs come as one card. Approve it and the books close through the last month every account has signed off. Here that's September.

You can close the tab while it works. The work runs on ZeraBooks' servers and the Ask Zera bar shows progress on every page.

Before you start

ZeraBooks doesn't connect to your bank, so the statements you download are the whole input. That's also what lets each month be proven against the bank's own numbers. For what Ask Zera won't do and the full limits, see the Ask Zera page. For everything else the AI does in ZeraBooks, see the AI bookkeeping overview.

Download the statements first. Everything after that is shorter than it looks.

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