Half the job is chasing

Ask a bookkeeper what takes up their week and you will not hear "coding transactions".

You will hear chasing.

On the bookkeeping forums, practitioners put it at 5 to 10 hours a week just following up on missing documents and unanswered questions. Some describe managing unresponsive clients as close to half the working week.

That is not a vendor statistic. That is people describing their own Tuesday.

This is why your books are behind

The easy read is that chasing is admin. Annoying, but a side issue.

It isn't. It's the whole problem.

Your bank feed arrives daily. Your invoices arrive daily. The raw material for current books is showing up continuously, and has been for years.

So why are you looking at numbers from last month?

Because twenty open questions sitting with four different people take a fortnight to clear. It does not matter how fast anything upstream runs. The queue is people, and people are slow.

That is the bottleneck. Everything else is downstream of it.

What bookkeepers actually do about it

Here is the interesting part. The profession has already solved this, and the solutions have nothing to do with speed.

Look at what bookkeepers have independently landed on:

**The visible holding account.** Park anything unresolved in an account named something like "??? ASK CLIENT". It sits on the client's own profit and loss, in plain sight, looking wrong.

**Owner's drawings.** Code receipt-less mystery charges straight to drawings or a loan account. Personal money hitting equity gets a reply faster than any email ever will.

**The hard cutoff.** Give a date each month. Anything unanswered by then goes to a default bucket and the books close anyway.

**One list, once.** Batch every question into a single monthly request instead of emailing per transaction.

Now notice what none of those do.

Not one of them makes the work faster. Every single one shifts the cost of silence onto the client.

The profession's answer to chasing is not efficiency. It is incentive design.

There is a line that turns up again and again in those threads, and it explains the whole approach: you cannot care more about their books than they do.

Which is a bit bleak, and also correct

Most of these tactics are variations on making the mess visible or making it embarrassing. They work. They are also a fairly grim description of a professional relationship.

And they only work at the pace of a monthly cycle. A holding account named "ASK CLIENT" does its job because someone eventually looks at a report. If you wanted books that were current on a Tuesday, shame would not get you there.

We think the reason is that the question usually reaches the wrong person, in the wrong format, at the wrong time.

A bookkeeper sends a list of forty items. The founder opens it on a phone, cannot answer thirty of them from memory, and closes it. Nothing about that is anyone's fault. The list was just built for the bookkeeper's convenience, not the founder's.

What we are trying instead

A named finance expert owns your books, with a system underneath doing the mechanical work.

That is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is what it lets you leave out.

If the system handles everything with a definite answer, the only things that reach a person are the ones a person genuinely has to answer. Not a review queue. Not a list of forty. The three things only you know, sent to you, with enough context that answering takes ten seconds.

Whether that beats a well-named holding account, we do not know yet. It is the thing we are working out.

The bit worth remembering

You will always have to ask people things. Some transactions carry information that simply is not in the data, and no system invents it.

The goal is not to stop asking.

It is to ask once, ask the right person, and make answering take seconds rather than a fortnight. Get that right and the books stay current on their own.

Everything else is just a queue.

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If you keep books for a living, we would like to know how your week actually splits. How much is the coding, and how much is chasing people for answers?

hello@hundi.com.au. No pitch, just the answer.