Small-business bookkeeping
Reckonly: turning a shoebox of receipts into books an accountant can use
Reckonly is a bookkeeping product Viva Studio designed, built and runs for Australian small businesses. It is live, and this page explains what it does, how it is put together, and which parts were genuinely hard — because those are the parts that tell you what a studio can actually do.
The problem
Every small business ends up with the same pile: paper receipts in a drawer, PDFs in an inbox, and someone typing them into accounting software one line at a time. It is slow, it is the first thing to fall behind when work gets busy, and mistyped GST is the kind of error nobody notices until BAS is due.
Who it is for
Australian small-business owners who keep their own books or hand them to an accountant each quarter, and who already work in Zoho Books.
What we built
The features that make up the product as it runs today.
- Photograph a receipt or forward it from your inbox — both routes end up in the same queue.
- OCR lifts the supplier, date, totals and GST straight off the image, so nobody types them in.
- The owner reviews the extracted figures before anything is posted, which is the difference between books you can trust and a pile of confident guesses.
- Confirmed expenses post to Zoho Books through its API as a draft, so the accountant keeps working in the tool they already know.
- GST is handled from the first receipt, and the quarter's expenses become a BAS summary PDF when it is due.
Stack and integrations
Built with
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Postgres on Supabase
Talks to
- Zoho Books API — confirmed expenses are pushed as draft entries.
- OCR for reading printed receipts.
The hard parts we solved
Any studio can list features. These are the parts that were genuinely difficult.
Keeping a human in the loop without making it tedious
The easy version of this product posts whatever the OCR returns. That produces books nobody can rely on. Reckonly always stops for a human review, so the work was in making that step fast enough that people do not resent it — the figures are laid out for checking, not re-entry.
Australian tax rules that generic software ignores
GST and the quarterly BAS are not an afterthought bolted onto an international product; they shape how every expense is stored from the moment it is captured. Getting that right from day one is why the BAS summary is a report rather than a rebuild.
Fitting into a workflow we do not control
Reckonly posts into Zoho Books, which means matching someone else's data model and failure modes without breaking the routine an accountant already has. This is the part that proves a new product can be connected to a third-party system people already depend on.
See it running, then talk to us about yours
Reckonly is live and you can open it right now. If your project needs something similar, that is the conversation to have.