Reckonly: receipts in, BAS out for Australian sole traders

Reckonly is a receipts-to-accounting pipeline for Australian sole traders and micro-businesses, built and run by our co-founder Anis Setoodeh before ELORA DIGITAL opened. A user photographs a receipt, AI reads the vendor, ABN, total, GST and date, the user confirms it, and it lands as a draft in Xero, MYOB AccountRight or Zoho Books. At the end of the quarter the app produces a BAS summary PDF. It is live at reckonly.com.au. This case study covers the problem it solves, what Anis built, how it was built and what it shows about the way we work.

Every Australian business registered for GST has the same recurring chore: the Business Activity Statement, usually every quarter. The GST on each business purchase has to be recorded, the receipts have to be kept, and the figures have to be in the accounting software by the time the BAS is due. For a tradesperson, a consultant or a small shop that means a shoebox of paper, a folder of PDFs and an evening of typing every three months, or a bookkeeper's invoice for doing the typing.

Accounting software does the ledger well. The gap is getting the receipt into it with the right numbers, and Reckonly's promise is that whole gap in one line: receipts in, BAS out.

Reckonly is a web app and an installable progressive web app, so it works in a browser and from a phone's home screen with no app store in between. The workflow runs in five steps:

1. Upload. A receipt photo or PDF goes straight to storage. Receipts can also be emailed in.
2. Read. AI OCR, built on Claude, extracts the vendor, ABN, total, GST and date, and gives each receipt a confidence score so the uncertain ones stand out.
3. Review and confirm. The user checks the extracted fields and confirms or corrects them. Nothing is sent anywhere until a person has looked at it.
4. Push. Confirmed receipts go to Xero, MYOB AccountRight or Zoho Books as drafts, ready for the business or its bookkeeper to approve in the ledger.
5. Report. A quarterly BAS summary PDF pulls the confirmed figures together.

Status updates appear live as receipts move through the pipeline. Sign-in works with Google or GitHub, billing runs through Stripe and transactional email through Postmark. Three plans cover the range of users: Free with 5 receipts a month, Starter at $19 a month for 250 receipts, and Pro at $49 a month for unlimited receipts.

For a business reader: the app has a modern web front end, an API running in Sydney, a PostgreSQL database and background jobs for the slow work, such as reading a receipt and talking to the accounting software. For a technical reader: .NET 10 and ASP.NET Core in a Clean Architecture layout with EF Core, PostgreSQL, Hangfire for background jobs and SignalR for live updates; Next.js 16 and React 19 with Tailwind and shadcn/ui on the front end; deployed to Vercel and Fly.io Sydney.

Five engineering decisions say more about the product than the stack does:

• Tenants cannot see each other. Reckonly is multi-tenant, and the organisation is applied as a query filter on the server. The client never supplies an organisation id, so there is no request a user could alter to read another business's receipts.
• The API never touches the file. Uploads go straight from the browser to storage through presigned URLs. The server hands out a short-lived permission to upload, and the receipt bytes never pass through it.
• Keys live in the database, not on disk. Encryption keys originally sat on temporary disk, and every deploy broke the OAuth connections to the accounting software. Moving them into Postgres fixed the breakage and made deploys uneventful, which is the point.
• A cost cap before the AI spends. Every OCR call costs money, so a billing check runs before the spend rather than after. A runaway script or an abusive account is stopped before it runs up a bill.
• A security audit, then fixes. An audit led to an SSRF guard, so the server will not fetch arbitrary addresses a user hands it, and rate limits on the endpoints that needed them.

Ownership from end to end. One person designed the data model, wrote the API, built the interface, wired up billing and email, and deployed it. That is how ELORA DIGITAL works too: a senior developer builds every project, with no handoffs to juniors.

Security as a default, not a line item. Tenant isolation, presigned uploads, encryption keys in the database, rate limits and an SSRF guard went into Reckonly because they are the baseline for any app that holds other people's financial records. Our security page describes the same standards for client work.

A person in the loop around AI. The AI reads the receipt, a person confirms it, and the accounting software receives a draft rather than a posted transaction. The model proposes and a person decides. We take the same approach when we build AI features for clients.

Shipping. Most of Reckonly was built in a concentrated period in mid 2026: the first commit was in May and most of the work happened in June. A clear scope and a single core workflow are what make that possible, and they are what our process is built around.

Reckonly is a product Anis built and runs himself. It belongs to him, not to ELORA DIGITAL, and it is not client work. No user, revenue or accuracy figures are published for it, and this page does not quote any. ELORA DIGITAL opened in October 2026, and client case studies will appear here as projects launch and each client agrees in writing to share their story. Until then, Reckonly and Scentena show how Anis builds, and our pricing shows what the same kind of work costs for a client.