The LTT bookkeeping process, opened up: from understanding your business to AI cutting up your receipts

Hook

Boss, have you ever wondered what actually happens after you hand a box of receipts to your accountant? Today we open up LTT's bookkeeping process. Sixteen steps, five stages, and over the past year an AI assistant on top.

Stage one: understand you first, then keep the books

A lot of people think bookkeeping starts with posting entries. Wrong. LTT's first step is understanding your business: where the income comes from, what the expenses are, whether there is a car on hire purchase, what bank loans there are, whether there is a second store, and what you use to raise invoices. Only then comes step two — designing your chart of accounts and planning the whole flow. The table of contents from the fourth lesson gets tailored to your business right here. And one honest word: tell us everything at the start. If a car on hire purchase only surfaces at step fifteen, the process rewinds to step three and starts again. Telling us late costs you your own time.

Stage two: the receipts arrive, and the AI takes over

Next comes intake — and this is where LTT has changed most in the past year, because the AI assistants have arrived. What you hand over might be a stack of scans, a pile of photos, or a box of loose paper. It used to be sorted by hand, one sheet at a time. Now our own tools take it: BillCleaver — dozens of receipts in one PDF? The AI cuts them apart, one receipt per file. FileWhiz — every document named and filed to standard automatically: whose bill, what type, what date, what amount, all readable in the filename and findable in seconds. That is the foundation under the fully paperless service from the seventh lesson: softcopy management. Your receipts stop being a box of paper and become a tidy digital archive you can search at any time.

Stages three and four: posting and reconciling

Only once the documents are complete does the part everybody thinks of as bookkeeping begin. Posting — every entry tagged to the right account code, the right contact, and where it applies the right project, which is where the job costing from the tenth lesson actually happens. Reconciling — the bank movements checked line by line, receivables and payables agreed against your customers and suppliers, stock, hire purchase and loan balances all confirmed. This is the most laborious step and the one that shows the quality of the work: numbers are not "keyed in" and done. They are done when there is not one sen that cannot be explained.

Stage five: the statements, and what comes after them

Finally the statements come out — but LTT does not throw you a PDF and call it finished. We talk you through them: where the gross margin went, which expense line jumped, why the cash is tight. As the eleventh lesson said, accounting is only useful when it understands the business. Then the process returns to the start: what we learned this period gets written into next period's chart of accounts and flow. Your books get more accurate and faster with every year.

To close

Sixteen steps, five stages, with AI behind them — that is the road your box of receipts travels. Want to see your own business run through it? Grab a coffee first and talk about your business. For the accounting, come to LTT. I am LTT, helping SME bosses get their accounts straight. Follow us, and see you next time.