Reported, not yet confirmed.
An agent that does the monthly books while the owner just approves
Paris app founder Tom Eberle gave a coding agent a command line for his accounting software, and in one afternoon took uncategorized operations from 183 to 4 and attached 22 missing invoices, he says. He built the tool himself.
You can hand the boring half of bookkeeping to an agent and keep only the yes or no. Tom Eberle, who ships apps from Paris, says "My AI agent now does my company's accounting. I just approve." On his real books, in one afternoon, uncategorized operations went from 183 to 4, "22 missing invoices" were "pulled from Gmail and attached," about 60 changes were written, and "3 overdue VAT returns" surfaced. The numbers are self-reported. We have not run it.
Disclosure: Eberle built and maintains dougs-cli, the tool this workflow depends on, and his post promotes it. It is free and open source under MIT, but he is not a neutral reviewer.
What it replaces#
His accounting app, Dougs, "had no public API, no MCP, no CLI." Before, "my agents did my books through hacky Python scripts and a session cookie copied from Chrome that expired every few weeks." So he built a command line, dougs-cli, and open-sourced it under MIT. He says "one Opus agent" wrote it "while another reviewed every change," with "245 tests, idea to npm in about 30 hours." It is his own free tool, and the README says it is "Unofficial: not affiliated with or endorsed by Dougs."
How it works#
The jobs he hands over, in his words:
- Missing receipts. "Find my invoices in Gmail and attach them in Dougs." The agent "reads the business inbox (read-only), pulls the PDFs, matches each one to its bank line by amount, date and vendor, and shows me the list before uploading anything."
- VAT on foreign software. Invoices from Meta ads, Claude, Google Cloud and Hostinger "say reverse charge, but they kept getting booked with deductible French VAT." Before a refund claim the agent "went through all 34 invoices and fixed every one booked wrong."
- Weird transactions. "The agent asks me once, books it properly, and writes the treatment down so next month it's automatic."
- Money questions. "How much do we spend on Convex per month?" is "answered from the actual ledger, with the operations behind the number."
His starter prompt: "Help me do my accounting with npm i -g dougs-cli and tell me what needs attention in my books." The README's monthly version:
Update my Dougs books for September: receipts, VAT and categories.
Good to know#
- Approval is the whole design. "Nothing reaches Dougs until I approve the plan. Months with a filed VAT return are never touched, every write is read back and checked."
- It stops short of filing. "It doesn't file the VAT return or replace the accountant. It does the legwork."
- It only fits Dougs. The idea travels: his reply in the thread was "most painful UIs can become MCPs / CLIs."
- The CLI is new, version 0.1.0, first published Oct 7, so expect rough edges.
Same idea in Grok Bot#
Grok Bot has a Gmail plugin for reading invoices. The safe copy is the receipts job: a monthly routine that matches invoice emails to a bank export and hands you one list to approve, writing nothing to your books itself. Logging an agent into accounting software with your password is a bigger step, so keep that one manual.
