Roots

by Sprout’n

Know what you actually made this month

Roots connects to Stripe and Shopify, reads your receipts, and gives you one honest figure instead of four conflicting ones.

It is the ninth of the month and somebody asks how last month went.

You can answer that question four ways. Stripe shows gross charges. Shopify shows orders, some of which were refunded. The bank shows what has landed, which is neither of those because payouts lag. And none of them know about the freight invoice you paid by card, or the sample run, or the booth fee for the market in March.

So you say it was a decent month and you mostly believe it. Then the accountant asks for a breakdown in April and you spend a weekend rebuilding a year from three exports and a drawer.

Roots exists so that weekend never happens, and so the answer on the ninth is a number rather than a feeling.

It reads the money you already have

Connect Stripe and Shopify once. Roots pulls every charge, refund, fee and payout, pairs the Shopify order with the Stripe charge that settled it, and stops counting the same money twice. Bank CSV and sales from Etsy, wholesale or a market stall import the same way.

  • Orders, refunds and the fees each processor charges
  • Payouts matched to the sales they swept
  • Duplicates found across sources, not within one

Receipts, without typing

Photograph a receipt on your phone, or forward a PDF. Roots reads the vendor, the date, the total and the tax, checks the arithmetic against the printed total, and shows you what it found. You confirm it before anything posts, every time.

  • Camera capture built for a crumpled receipt on a van seat
  • The tax line read separately, because you will be asked for it
  • The original kept for six years, because the law says so

Cash, not revenue

Revenue is a story about the past. Cash is the thing that runs out. Roots separates what has landed in the bank from what is still sitting inside a processor, and tells you the date the rest arrives rather than averaging it into a number that is true of no particular day.

An export your accountant can open

One CSV of transactions and expenses over any date range, plus a ZIP of every receipt original, with filenames that tie each row back to the document it came from. It opens in Xero, QuickBooks and Sage because it is an ordinary transaction file rather than a format only we use.

What Roots will not do

Worth saying plainly, because the limits are the reason to trust the numbers that are there.

It does not file your taxes

It captures what you spent, what it was for and the tax shown on the document. Which of that is deductible, and at what rate, is jurisdiction law that differs by province before it differs by country. Roots hands your accountant better inputs rather than pretending to replace them.

It does not convert currencies

If you sell in two currencies, Roots reports in one and says plainly what it left out and why. An approximation under a cash figure is worse than a withheld one, because you would spend it.

It does not post anything you have not seen

Every extracted receipt is confirmed by a person before it reaches your books. The software is good at reading and bad at being certain, and it is built to know the difference.

Roots comes with everything

$25/month

for your first 6 months, then $50 a month

One subscription covers Roots, Harvest and Seed. Pay $300 for a full year inside the first 6 months and you keep the opening rate for all twelve.

Get started

Roots is for the founder who is running a real business out of three dashboards and a drawer, and would like to stop.