Your books, stood up right the first time, and your payroll checked before payday.
You connected QuickBooks (or Xero) and Gusto, and now you have two problems that both cost real money later. The books aren't actually set up, they're just connected. And your next payroll run is the first time anyone will notice if something is wrong. Books-in-a-Box sets up the chart of accounts, categorizes and reconciles your opening period, produces a clean opening statement, and then reads your payroll and flags what's wrong, before the money moves.
Set up my books Sanity-check my payroll
THE PROBLEM
Connecting an accounting system is not the same as having your books set up, and everyone finds that out a quarter too late. The chart of accounts is a default template that doesn't match how you actually spend, the opening transactions are uncategorized, nothing is reconciled, and the first real financial statement you pull is quietly wrong. Then there's payroll, which is worse, because payroll has a deadline and it moves money. You run it, and if an employee is misclassified or a tax setup is missing, you don't find out from a warning, you find out from a notice. The two things a new company most needs to get right (its books and its first payroll) are the two things nobody checks at the moment they're being set up.
HOW IT WORKS
It runs one onboarding pass in two lanes. The books lane connects your ledger (QuickBooks or Xero), sets up the chart of accounts, and here it stops and asks, because setting up your chart writes to your books and it will not do that without you saying yes. Once you confirm, it categorizes the opening period, reconciles the bank statement, reviews your expenses, seeds the tax calendar and the 1099 basis, and produces your opening financial statement. Then the payroll lane reads your Gusto payrolls and employees, recomputes payroll as an independent check figure (it does not submit anything), and flags what's wrong: misclassification, missing tax setup, off-cycle anomalies, a check-figure that doesn't match. You get a clean set of books and a list of payroll problems to fix, before payday, not after.
WHAT YOU GET
One pass that leaves you with correct books and a caught payroll error: - a connected ledger, read from QuickBooks or Xero, - a chart of accounts set up on your confirmation, not written to your books behind your back, - an opening period categorized and reconciled, so your first statement is real, - an opening financial statement, plus a seeded tax calendar and 1099 basis, - a payroll sanity pass over Gusto that flags misclassification, missing tax setup, and check-figure deltas, as advice you act on, not an action it takes for you.
WHO IT'S FOR
Newly formed or recently migrated small companies (solo founders, micro-teams, up to around twenty employees) that connected an accounting system and Gusto but never had the books set up correctly, and are one payroll run away from a mistake nobody is checking for. Bookkeepers and fractional finance operators onboarding a new client fit here too, run the setup-and-sanity pass once, cleanly, and hand the client the receipt. This is not for anyone who wants the agent to actually run payroll or write to their books unattended, because it does neither.
PRICING (the ladder)
- Free / dogfood: AYA runs the full pass on its own books, and the free tier runs the payroll-sanity flag pass for one company (read-and-flag only, no books write). - Setup (one-time): a full books-in-a-box setup for one company, chart of accounts through opening financials, plus a payroll sanity pass. - Payroll sanity (recurring): a pre-payroll check over Gusto each pay period, so the catch happens every time, not just at setup.
(These prices are hypotheses we're validating in Phase 2, not commitments.)
THE PROOF (dogfood)
AYA is itself a company that just connected its own accounting and payroll, so it runs this on itself. It sets up AYA's own chart of accounts (with the founder pressing the confirm), reconciles AYA's opening period, produces AYA's opening financials, and runs a Gusto payroll sanity pass over AYA's own payroll before the first real run. The part that usually gets faked (that the setup writes to the right accounts and that the payroll flags are real catches before payday, not notes after) is the part we prove on ourselves first. setup + sanity receipt to follow
HONEST NOTE
It sets up, it doesn't take over. The chart-of-accounts step writes to your books only after you confirm, and if you don't confirm, it stops there rather than guess. The payroll lane never runs payroll, it reads Gusto and hands you flags, because a company's money moving is a line we won't cross on your behalf. And the honest state today: this is built as pattern data over capabilities AYA already ships, it scores and its pieces resolve, but it has not yet run end-to-end on live data, because that needs your QuickBooks or Xero and your Gusto actually connected, and a running system to connect them to. That's a credentials-and-connection gap, and we'd rather say so than show you a demo that quietly used fake books.
*This page is a specification. The capability it describes is not built yet, and nothing here is a claim that it runs today.*