Documents arrive. Invoices get filed. Anomalies get flagged. VAT returns calculate themselves. Year-end accounts close on schedule. You just review and approve.
Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage digitised paperwork. They never automated it. You still key in invoices, chase debtors, reconcile banks, and calculate VAT by hand. That is not technology — that is a typewriter with a subscription.
Every invoice, every receipt, every bill — still keyed in by a human. Multiply that by 50 clients and you have a practice running on busywork.
Per-user, per-company, per-feature pricing. Your software bill grows faster than your fee income. Cancel one add-on and you lose a critical workflow.
Your clients' financial data lives on someone else's servers, in someone else's jurisdiction. Export it? CSV with mangled dates. Move it? Start from scratch.
"Bank rules" that match 40% of transactions. "Smart" categorisation that guesses wrong. No anomaly detection, no filing pipeline, no event-driven workflows.
Built for American tax codes, then retrofitted for UK. VAT box mapping is an afterthought. Companies House integration? Not even on the roadmap.
Proprietary formats. No API access on lower tiers. Acquisitions that kill features you depend on. You do not own your workflow — they do.
From the moment a document arrives to the day year-end accounts are filed — every step is handled by software, not people. You review. You approve. The system does the rest.
Drop a document in the inbox. Five specialised agents take it from raw file to posted ledger entry — with duplicate detection, confidence scoring, and audit logging at every stage.
Monitors inbox folder. Detects new files. Triggers pipeline.
Extracts dates, amounts, suppliers, VAT, line items from any document.
Maps to chart of accounts. Posts to correct ledger tabs. Deduplicates.
Validates postings. Flags low confidence. Checks for errors.
Moves verified entries between workbook tabs. Archives processed files.
Built by accountants, for accountants. Every transaction posts double-entry journal lines. Every balance reconciles. Every VAT box maps correctly.
Full chart of accounts with 60+ pre-loaded UK Ltd accounts. Journal posting with automatic balance enforcement. Trial balance, P&L, and balance sheet. NUMERIC(19,4) precision throughout — no floating-point rounding.
Sales invoices, purchase bills, credit notes. Multi-line with per-line tax codes. Automatic GL posting on approval. PDF generation. Void and reversal flows.
Receive payments against invoices, pay bills with allocation. Partial payments, overpayments, unallocated receipts. Over-allocation guard prevents posting errors.
Import CSV bank statements. Auto-match transactions by amount, date, and description with fuzzy scoring. Manual match for the rest. Full reconciliation status tracking.
7 preset UK VAT rates (standard, reduced, zero, exempt, reverse charge, flat rate). VAT return calculation with correct HMRC box mapping. Digital filing via Making Tax Digital API.
Real 2025/26 HMRC tax bands and NI thresholds. Student loan plans 1, 2, 4 and postgraduate. Pension auto-enrolment. Tax code parsing: L, BR, D0, D1, K, NT, 0T, S, C codes.
Expense submission and approval workflow. Product and service catalogue with default accounts and tax codes. Automatic posting on approval.
Customer and supplier management. Multiple addresses, payment terms, credit limits, tax settings. Contact activity timeline.
Trial Balance, Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Forecast, Aged Debtors, Aged Creditors. All generated in real-time from posted journals.
Every automation runs on schedule or triggers from events. Debt chasing, anomaly detection, cash flow forecasting, year-end preparation — all without human intervention.
Automated payment reminders with 3 escalation stages: gentle, firm, final. Template interpolation with client and invoice variables. Configurable intervals.
Benford's Law analysis on leading digits. Z-score outlier detection. Duplicate transaction finder. Round-number pattern analysis. Weekend posting alerts.
Linear regression on historical posting data. 90-day receivables and payables lookahead. Identifies upcoming cash shortfalls before they become crises.
Live company search, director lookup, filing history, compliance status. Direct API integration — no scraping, no third-party middleware.
Automated P&L, balance sheet, and notes to accounts generation. iXBRL tagging for Companies House filing. 8-point integrity check before sign-off.
Cron-based job automation. 7 default jobs (backups, debt chasing, anomaly scans, VAT reminders, filing scans). Manual trigger. Enable/disable per job.
If-this-then-that rules on 28 event types. Trigger notifications, emails, status updates, or webhooks when invoices are overdue, payments are received, anomalies are detected.
SHA-256 hash chain on every financial mutation. Tamper-evident integrity verification. Every create, update, and delete logged with user, timestamp, and before/after state.
One-click full database export covering 18 tables. Import with FK-ordered deduplication. Automated daily backups with 30-day retention. Disaster recovery tested.
The AI accountant has 14 tools that read your live ledger data. It does not hallucinate figures — it queries your actual trial balance, invoices, and tax returns. It follows UK GAAP (FRS 102) and HMRC VAT regulations.
The Doc Intel engine uses NER (Named Entity Recognition) to extract structured data from invoices, receipts, bills, and statements — no LLM required for the extraction pipeline.
Supplier names, contact persons, company numbers, VAT registration numbers, bank details, addresses with UK postcodes — all extracted automatically.
Line items with descriptions, quantities, unit prices. Net amounts, VAT amounts, totals. Multiple tax rates per document. Currency detection.
Issue dates, due dates, delivery dates, tax point dates. Handles UK date formats (DD/MM/YYYY), relative dates, and ISO formats. All normalised to standard format.
After extraction, the system suggests the correct action: create a purchase bill, post an expense, generate a credit note. Pre-fills the form with extracted data.
Full-text search across all processed documents. Find any invoice, receipt, or bill by content, amount, supplier, or date range. ChromaDB-powered vector search.
Invoice numbers, purchase order numbers, delivery note references, credit note numbers — all detected and cross-referenced against existing records.
A direct, honest comparison. No marketing asterisks.
| Capability | Xero | QuickBooks | Sage | LedgerCore |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Double-entry ledger | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| UK payroll (PAYE/NI/SL/Pension) | Add-on | Add-on | Yes | Built-in |
| HMRC MTD VAT filing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI document extraction | Hubdoc | No | No | 5-agent pipeline |
| Anomaly detection (Benford's) | No | No | No | Built-in |
| Automated debt chasing | Basic | No | No | 3-stage escalation |
| Cash flow forecasting | Premium | No | Add-on | Built-in |
| Workflow engine (28 events) | No | No | No | Built-in |
| Companies House integration | No | No | No | Direct API |
| AI accountant (natural language) | No | No | No | 14 tools |
| SHA-256 audit trail | No | No | No | Hash chain |
| Year-end with iXBRL | No | No | Add-on | Built-in |
| Multi-tenant (run for clients) | No | No | No | Schema isolation |
| Self-hosted / data sovereignty | No | No | Desktop only | Your servers |
| Open-source (Apache 2.0) | No | No | No | Fully open |
| Per-user pricing | Yes (cost) | Yes (cost) | Yes (cost) | Unlimited users |
Multi-tenant with schema isolation. Raw SQL for financial precision. Every design decision serves accuracy, auditability, and data sovereignty.
Each organisation gets its own PostgreSQL schema. Complete data isolation — one client's data can never leak to another, even with a bug in the application layer.
Owner, Admin, Accountant, Read-Only. Hierarchical permissions. JWT auth with 15-minute access tokens, refresh rotation with blacklisting, bcrypt-12 password hashing.
28 event types flow through a durable PostgreSQL-backed event bus. Audit trail, workflow engine, scheduler, and notifications all subscribe automatically. No polling.
Run all your clients on one system with multi-tenant isolation. Each client gets their own schema, their own chart of accounts, their own data — managed from one dashboard.
Stop paying per-client subscriptions to Xero. Run LedgerCore on a £20/month server and handle 50 clients with the same automation that large practices use.
Keep your books on your own infrastructure. No data leaves your network. Your accountant gets a read-only login. Year-end preparation happens automatically.
Pull the repo. Backend, frontend, migrations, and filing agent — everything is included.
One command starts PostgreSQL. Migrations run automatically on first boot. Tables created per tenant.
Backend on port 3005, frontend on 3002. Swagger docs at /api. Full API reference included.
Register your first organisation. The chart of accounts loads automatically. Start posting transactions.
LedgerCore is built by the team behind Hush AI — 40 years of accounting experience, combined with sovereign AI infrastructure. Every feature exists because a practising accountant needed it.
LedgerCore is accounting software, not accounting advice. Always verify outputs with a qualified professional. AI-generated suggestions should be reviewed before posting.