Mesh - AI Agent for Bank Reconciliation

Hey YC!

We’re Erin & Nandini, co-founders of @Mesh. We’ve worked together on accounting automation for 5+ years at Carta. Our mission is to democratize financial automation to all operationally driven accounting firms, so that they can scale without outsourcing.

TL;DR

• ⚠️ Accounting firms are outsourcing due to a shortage of accountants, but outsourcing often involves potential delays + errors, onboarding + training, and data security risks
• 🏦 A core recurring function that gets outsourced is reconciliation of bank transactions
• ✒️ Mesh offers an AI agent that can auto-reconcile thousands of transactions within minutes

https://youtu.be/AanVh5W7zpo

Problem

There’s a mass shortage of accountants, and it’s predicted that 75% of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) are going to retire in the next 15 years. Meanwhile, the demand for accounting services isn’t going down. To keep up with this mismatched supply and demand, accounting firms often have to tap into outsourced talent abroad in order to cost effectively scale and service more clients.

However, outsourcing often involves onboarding / training, potential delays and errors, communication challenges, and data security risks. The immediate cost savings on labor might incur costs in other areas of the business, impacting overall efficiency.

So, we asked – can we build agents to automate some of these outsourced tasks? And if so, what is the first task that will have the biggest impact on time savings?

Accountants need to import and map hundreds, if not thousands, of bank transactions against the Chart of Accounts (COA) to balance the books every month. It’s a tedious, but necessary, exercise that involves:

Some of this is partially automated if you’re incorporating a modern tech stack (i.e. Brex, Ramp). But when you’re a service provider, you often don’t have control over your clients’ banking choices and need to operate across multiple bank accounts and thousands of transactions. Even within a single organization, the same problem arises if you’re operating across multiple bank accounts, especially in a high transaction-volume business.

Solution

The above process is full of opportunities to streamline, but we’re starting with mapping transactions to the right COA step for a few reasons:

• It’s the most time-consuming step.
• Our prospects are already outsourcing this exact task (and not having the best experience)
• It’s a perfect use case for LLM in accounting.

Our goal is to seamlessly embed within existing processes and tech stack that accountants currently use. Most of the accounting world still mainly relies on some combination of Excel / Google Sheets, Quickbooks, Xero, and Netsuite. With that in mind, we built a plug-and-play reconciliation tool that gets the job done with just 3 steps:

1. Upload your COA (if you’ve previously uploaded, we’ll retrieve & skip this step)
2. Upload your transactions
3. Review + export the AI-reconciled transactions

Our Ask

We’re looking to chat with accountants at different firms to better understand the similarities + differences in their workflows. Please connect us at erin.kim@usemesh.com to any:

• Accounting firms (i.e. fund administration, tax, bookkeeping, audit)
• Fractional CFOs who offer bookkeeping / monthly close services
• In-house controllers (at companies + funds)

We can’t wait to help them save time & money.

– Erin & Nandini