Who this is for
You keep books for a business and you will not put bank statements into a cloud product. Perhaps the data is regulated. Perhaps you read a terms-of-service page once and decided no. Perhaps you simply do not want your general ledger to be a row in someone else's database — something they can reprice, restructure, discontinue or lose.
That is the entire market for this, and we would rather say so plainly. If you are happy with a cloud bookkeeping subscription, keep it. It is cheaper than we are and it works. This is for the person for whom “it lives in the cloud” is the disqualifier rather than the feature.
The sentence a cloud product cannot write
Every bookkeeping product on the market says it takes your privacy seriously. That is an adjective. Here is the clause we sign instead, word for word out of the engagement letter:
“No statement document, journal entry, account number, balance, or other Client financial data is transmitted by the installed system to any third-party model provider, cloud service, or Yayster system.”
It is written as a material term and a warranty — a thing we are liable for if it is untrue, not a description of how we hope the software behaves. The model that drafts your entries runs on the computer in your office. There is no inference API behind it to send anything to.
A cloud bookkeeping product cannot write that sentence, because uploading your statements is how it works. That is not a criticism of those products. It is the one thing we are selling instead of them, and it is the reason this offer exists.
What you own at the end of three weeks
- ✓A machine in your office that runs the whole thing. No account, no API key, no network dependency. Pull out the internet cable and it still closes the month.
- ✓Your books as plain-text Ledger files. One folder. Copy it to a USB stick. Open it with ledger or hledger — both free, both open source — with us or without us, this year or in ten years.
- ✓A chart of accounts built around your business, not a template with your name typed into it. We build it with you in the first week.
- ✓An inbox that takes statement PDFs. One PDF or a stack of them, across more than one account, including accounts that have no journal yet. Drafted double-entry lines come out the other side.
- ✓A duplicate gate. A posting whose date, account and amount are already in the books is refused, so re-running a statement cannot quietly double your expenses.
- ✓Reporting from your phone. Ask a question, get back what the reporting command printed against your own files. Statements stay in the office; the phone is for asking.
- ✓One month closed, with you doing the approving. You will have done the job once, with us in the room, before we leave.
- ✓A written runbook. How to run it, how to fix the things that break, and how to change the chart of accounts yourself.
- ✓A signed certificate that our access is closed. It lists every access path we ever created and the date each one was shut, and confirms no copy of your data remains with us. It is a numbered deliverable and a condition of our final payment — so the last thing we do to earn the invoice is prove we can no longer reach your books.
The model drafts. A person signs. The command prints the number.
Three rules hold the whole thing up, and they are the reason it is defensible to put a language model anywhere near a set of books.
- 1The model never files anything. It drafts double-entry lines from the statement. Your named approver checks the draft against the statement. Only a balanced, approved draft is appended — and a gate refuses a posting whose date, account and amount are already in the books, so running the same PDF twice cannot double your expenses.
- 2A validator rejects anything that breaks a hard rule, with no judgement and no model involved. Money leaving the account can never be income. A category that is not on your chart does not exist. These checks cannot be talked around, because they cannot be reasoned with.
- 3A report is what
ledgerprinted. You ask a question; the system runs the command against your files and hands back the output. It does not summarise, estimate or narrate. If you do not trust the answer, run the same command yourself — the files are right there.
We published the method before we had anything to sell
Those three rules are not a precaution we invented for a brochure. We wrote the method up in public before there was an offer attached to it — the prompt, the guardrails, the grading, and the failures we ran into — free, in enough detail to build it yourself if you would rather. You can read how it works before you decide whether you want us to install it.
How we do local LLM bookkeeping, written out in full
The method, the prompt, the one-line guardrail that catches a sign error, and what we learned building it. Read how we did it →
What is not included
This list is why three weeks is a real number rather than a hope, and it goes into the contract, not just the pitch.
- ×Payroll. The close can post a paystub your payroll provider already ran. It does not calculate withholding, deposit payroll taxes, file the 941 or a state return, or issue W-2s.
- ×Logging into your bank. We never hold a credential to a bank account. You export the statement PDFs; the system reads those.
- ×A custom mobile app. You message the machine over an app you already have, on a private connection, locked to your number.
- ×A year of catch-up inside the fixed price. The three weeks close one month, build the chart and leave the system working. Historical months are priced separately — see above.
- ×The computer. We specify the machine with you and you buy it, so it is yours from the first day. We will not quote you a model or a price we have not measured ourselves.
Behind on the books? Catch-up is priced by the month.
Almost everyone who wants this is behind, and “one month closed” invites the obvious question. So catch-up is a separate, published add-on priced per month of history, and you decide how far back is worth paying for.
Priced per month of history, quoted on the call
Worked oldest month first, each one closed and approved the same way the first one was. Quoted after we have seen the statements, because a month with forty transactions and a month with four hundred are not the same month.
After we leave, you pick one
DEFAULT
Clean handoff
No ongoing fee
Our access to the machine terminates when you accept the work. This happens on its own — no notice, no request, nothing for you to remember to do. You keep the computer, the files and the runbook. We are done, and nothing you own stops working because we stopped talking.
Continuing access
A fixed monthly fee, quoted on the call
A private connection to that one machine — nothing else on your network — with a stated response window and a stated scope: the machine stays up and the drafting keeps working. Changes to your chart of accounts, catch-up and anything new are billed separately. It is a separate addendum you sign and pay for, month to month, thirty days' notice either way. It is not a bookkeeping service and it does not make us your bookkeeper.
Terms, in plain language
- •Your named approver is the bookkeeper of record. You name that person in the engagement letter, and a human on your side approves every entry before it is posted — a contractual fact, not a nicety. Yayster is not your bookkeeper, accountant, auditor, controller, tax preparer or agent. We are not a CPA firm, nobody doing the work is a CPA, enrolled agent or attorney, and we do not maintain your books or approve a single entry in them. We install the system; your person runs it.
- •No tax advice. We do not advise on tax, file returns, or represent you before any authority.
- •We are not auditing anything, and nobody may say we did. We give no audit, review, compilation or attestation, and no opinion on whether your books are right. You cannot tell a lender, investor, insurer or taxing authority that Yayster prepared, reviewed, verified or blessed a record or a report. The reports are your files printed by a command your own staff can run.
- •Data handling is written down before we start — where your statements live, who can reach the machine, what we may never copy, and exactly what happens to our access at handoff. The no-upload promise above is a numbered clause in that document.
- •There is a liability cap, and you will see it before you sign. It is set at the fees you actually paid us, with a stated list of things it does not cover. The out-of-scope list above appears in the engagement letter word for word.
The engagement letter is signed before the install starts. No exceptions, including for us.
How it starts
Discovery call — free, thirty minutes
How many accounts, how far behind, who approves, and what you are not willing to put online. If a cloud product is the better answer for you, we will say so on this call.
Written proposal and engagement letter
Fixed price, the dates, the hardware specification, the out-of-scope list word for word, and the data-handling terms. Nothing starts before it is signed.
Three weeks in your office
Week one, the chart of accounts and the machine. Week two, the inbox and the drafting, against your real statements. Week three, the first close — you approving, us watching — and the runbook.
Handoff
You accept the work. Our access ends and you get the certificate that says so — unless you have separately signed and paid for the monthly option, which is the only thing that keeps it open. The files were always yours.
Tell us what your books look like now
How many accounts, how far behind, and who would do the approving. Thirty minutes, no commitment, and we will tell you if this is the wrong thing for you.
A human reads every message.