
Stripe backs $40M investment in AI accounting service Pilot.com - aston
http://fortune.com/2019/04/17/pilot-software/
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adam_gyroscope
We used pilot at my company (Gyroscope; sold to BlueVoyant in March last
year). I had been doing my own books, which was annoying and not a good use of
my time or something I’m good at. Pilot saved me a few hours a week for not
too much money, totally worth it. (Full disclosure I know the founding team
very well)

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danthe
What is the extent of their automation? Do they really do accrual accounting?
It seems their customer base is companies that only accept payments online
(mostly through Stripe) and they do cash basis accounting. Mind if I ping you
for more questions on your experience with them?

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adam_gyroscope
Please do ping me! My company was pretty starightforward, but I know they
handle some fairly complex companies.

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danthe
For example if I get a pdf bill in my inbox for some saas subscription, how
does the pdf make it into QuickBooks? @wdaher is implying you need to be using
bill.com, so I'm concluding that you need to get the bill into bill.com.

Another case is do they do expense accruals? E.g. i don't get my utilities
bill until middle of the month. The right way to account for that is to accrue
the expense for the previous month and reverse the journal entry on the 1st of
the following month. How does Pilot automate expense accruals cases (same
question for revenue)?

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wdaher
Yes, generally you have to use something like a bill.com or routable
([https://routable.com/](https://routable.com/)) if you want to track an AP
flow starting with the bill in that way.

(There's a more premium version of Pilot Plus where you basically just forward
the bill to bill.com and we'll code it and submit it for approval for you,
etc.)

As for expense and revenue accruals, you and we have to mutually agree on a
mechanism for you to communicate that information to us. Exactly what that
mechanism is will depend on the details of the revenue or expense accrual, but
sometimes this is as simple as "You tell us you have a recurring expense of X
amount, so you need to accrue y% of it every month", sometimes it's just you
report "I'd like to accrue X", etc.

