Close your month in fifteen minutes.
Upload your bank statement. RE matches every line, asks about the ones it doesn’t know, and won’t close the month until the books agree with the bank at exactly $0.00. Then it locks. That’s the whole product.
And when you hand the role on, your successor inherits one file that opens and reconciles — no account transfer, no password reset, no vendor in the middle. $199 once for the whole organisation, however many treasurers come after you.
Sound familiar?
You don’t have a bookkeeping problem.
You have a “is this actually right?” problem.
Every tool you’ve tried answers the wrong question. The spreadsheet holds numbers but can’t prove them. QuickBooks holds features you’ll never use — for $600 a year, with a bank feed that breaks in March. Neither will look you in the eye and say: this month is right, and it’s done.
Free, until it’s wrong
No double-entry, no matching, no lock. One typo in February lives in your totals forever — and nobody finds it until audit season. You don’t keep books; you keep hope.
90% features, 0% finished
Invoicing, payroll, inventory, projects — everything except a plain answer to “does this match the bank?” The feed drifts, the price rises, and “reconciled” is a report you run, not a state you reach.
Done for you, until it isn’t
12,000 businesses had their books inside Bench when it shut down overnight — mid tax-season. Books you can’t see, in a company you can’t control, are not peace of mind. They’re a dependency.
The ritual
Statement in.
Certainty out.
RE is built around the one routine that makes books true — settling each month against the bank’s own document, then locking it. Five moves, once a month:
Import
Upload the month’s statement — CSV or PDF, from any bank on earth. RE detects the columns, the date format, and the money format on its own.
Match
Rows pair with your entries automatically only when there’s exactly one honest candidate. Everything else waits for you — RE never guesses with your books.
Categorize
Unknown rows become proper double-entry records in one tap. RE pre-fills from what it learned last month; you confirm, it remembers forever.
Watch it reach zero
The big number — closing balance minus what’s explained — counts down as you work. It isn’t a progress bar. It’s arithmetic.
Close & lock
At $0.00 with nothing unmatched, the month closes and locks. You get a one-page report worth showing a board, a spouse, or an accountant.
Simple reporting
Three reports.
One page each.
Where the money went. What you have. Proof it’s right. That’s the whole reporting surface — no report builder, no 40-tab workbook, no dashboard homework.
- Income & expenses — by category, for any period, with a budget beside it if you want one
- Balance sheet — what you own and owe, carried correctly across year-ends
- The close report — each month’s certificate: reconciled, to the penny, by whom
Everything else is a clean CSV export away.
Why this, and not the free one
Every treasurer leaves.
The books shouldn’t.
The average volunteer treasurer serves eighteen to twenty-four months. Then someone else takes the role — and inherits, most often, a login nobody has the password to, a spreadsheet with three tabs called final, and a shoebox. The handoff is the moment small-organisation bookkeeping actually fails, and it is the one moment no product in this market has ever designed for.
That folder is the handoff. Copy it, and you have copied every closed month, every receipt and the audit trail of who did what. Open any of it in a text editor — it reads like what it is.
Not a screenshot, not a video — the actual files, for a small organisation with twelve entries. Open book.json in a text editor before you pay us anything.
Or open the product itself — a real book, read-only, no account, no email.
Nothing to transfer
No account to move between people, no billing seat to reassign, no support ticket to open. The successor is added as a user, or handed the folder. Both take minutes.
Every month arrives proven
A closed month in RE reached $0.00 against a real bank statement and then locked. Your successor is not inheriting your arithmetic on trust — they are inheriting months that already agreed with the bank.
The audit trail comes too
Who entered what, who cleared it, who closed the month, and when. The questions a new treasurer or a board actually asks are already answered in the file.
This is the claim we would defend in front of anyone: QuickBooks structurally cannot make it, because your books live in their database behind their account system. The free desktop tools give you the file and have never built the ritual around it. We built the ritual.
The honest comparison
Including the ones that beat us.
If you only care about price, stop reading and install Manager.io — it is free, mature, double-entry, and it keeps your books in a file on your own machine. We would rather tell you that than have you find it after you have paid us.
| Cost | “Is it right?” | The treasurer handoff | |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks / Xero / Zoho | $420–$1,680 every year | A report you run and hope | Account transfer, billing seat, support ticket |
| MoneyMinder / Aplos | $299–$2,124 every year | Bank feed, then a reconcile screen | Their account, transferred by them |
| Manager.io / GnuCash wins on price | Free, genuinely | Full double-entry, if you drive it | You get the file. Nothing else. |
| A spreadsheet | Free, plus your weekends | Nobody can actually say | Three tabs called final |
| Outsourced bookkeeping | $200–$600 every month | You’re trusting, not knowing | Ask Bench’s customers |
| RE | $199 once, org-wide | Provably — $0.00 or it won’t close | One folder. Opens and reconciles. |
Manager.io Desktop and GnuCash are free, and on “own your own file” they match us exactly — we are not going to pretend otherwise. What you are paying us for is the close ritual and the handoff built around that file. Competitor figures are published 2026 prices; details on the pricing page.
Who it’s for
Anyone who answers to someone about money.
RE is for the books behind small, real things — where one person keeps the money straight and other people trust them to.
Volunteer treasurers get a special gift: at handoff, the next treasurer inherits a clean folder and a stack of closed months — not a shoebox and an apology.
“Your books should close like a door — firmly, once, with the satisfying sound of everything accounted for. And they should belong to you.”
The RE manifesto
Before you ask
The three questions everyone asks.
Do I have to connect my bank account?
No — and you can’t, on purpose. RE never touches your bank. You download the statement you already get and hand it to RE, the same way you’d hand it to an accountant. No credentials, no feed, no aggregator in the middle.
I’m not an accountant. Is double-entry going to hurt?
You’ll never see it unless you go looking. You tap Expense, Income, or Transfer and pick a category; RE builds the balanced entry underneath and rejects anything that doesn’t add up. Your accountant gets real books. You get three buttons.
What happens to my books if RE goes away?
Nothing. Your installation keeps running, and your books are human-readable files in a folder on your machine — a documented format any tool can read. The worst case of our failure is that you stop getting updates. The full answer.
Early access
Bring one statement.
Leave with a closed month.
Your first month is free to close — no card, no bank connection, nothing to cancel. If the number doesn’t reach $0.00, you’ll know exactly why. That alone is worth the fifteen minutes.
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