Hi, I'm Chanaveer. You can find me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanaveer-kadapatti/
Couple of weeks back, someone asked for my help in writing a PRD and designing a prototype to to address a specific issue in book keeping software. Typically, human book keepers need to work with customers to address issues in automatical financial transaction categorization on an ongoing basis. Transaction Categorization is the process of assigning the right account from customer's chart of accounts to every accounting transaction that comes in through customer's financial intermediary platforms such as Paypal, Stripe, Credit Cards, Ramp for both income & expense.
The PRD and interactive prototype in this repo is a result of that exercise. Based on my experience as an AI & Platform Product Manager, I wrote the PRD to solve this problem via automations, of which agents are one part. I've proposed a multi-agent framework to address transaction categorization, learning and on-going review of transactions.
This repo contains an interactive HTML prototype I built called Bookkeep42 - Transaction categorization prototype.html. It is a clickable mockup of an AI agent that helps small businesses sort their financial transactions into the right accounting categories. The prototype is a single HTML file. You can open it in any modern browser. There is no backend and no install step.
I built this prototype alongside a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for a fictional bookkeeping product called Bookkeep42. The PRD is in this folder too. The prototype is meant to bring the ideas in the PRD to life so you can click through them instead of just reading about them.
Every business spends and earns money every day. Each of those payments is a transaction. To know if the business is profitable, to file taxes, and to make decisions, the business needs to put each transaction into a labeled bucket. Examples of buckets are "Revenue", "Payroll", "Software", or "Office Supplies". This labeling is called categorization.
Most small business owners do not have time to label every transaction. They also do not always know which bucket is correct. So they hire a bookkeeping service. Bookkeep42 is that kind of service. It pulls in transactions from places like Stripe (sales) and Ramp (corporate cards), labels them, and gives the owner clean financial reports at the end of each month. A CPA then uses those reports to file taxes.
Three kinds of people use Bookkeep42:
- The Small Business Owner (SBO) - The person who runs the business. They want to know how the business is doing. They are not an accounting expert.
- The Bookkeeper - A trained person at Bookkeep42 who reviews and fixes the labels every month before the books are closed.
- The CPA - The tax accountant who reviews the final reports and files taxes.
Today, most of the labeling is done by software using simple rules, and the rest is done by hand by the bookkeeper. Two things go wrong:
- Some transactions are hard to label. A charge from "Amazon" could be office supplies, software, or shipping. A charge from "Google" could be ads or email storage. A wire transfer from the owner could be a loan, a salary, or extra investment in the company. The software cannot always tell.
- The owner does not see why a label was picked. They just see the final report. If something looks off, they do not know what to question.
When labels are wrong and nobody catches it, the financial reports are wrong. The errors get worse over months and they are very painful to fix at tax time.
This prototype shows how an AI agent could help. The agent labels each transaction and gives a confidence score. When the score is low, the agent asks for help instead of guessing. When a person corrects a label, the agent learns from that correction and uses it the next time. The goal is to fix problems early, build trust with the owner, and save the bookkeeper hours of cleanup.
- Download or clone this repo.
- Double-click
Bookkeep42 - Transaction categorization prototype.html. - It will open in your browser. That is all.
There is no login. The data shown is sample data for a made-up company called Meridian Labs, Inc. for the month of April 2026.
In the top-right corner of the screen there are three buttons: SBO, Bookkeeper, and CPA. Click any one to see the same product from that user's point of view. The menu on the left side and the home page change based on who you are. This is the easiest way to see the full prototype.
If this is your first time looking at the prototype, here is the path I would suggest. It takes about 5 minutes.
The page opens as Spencer Chen, the SBO. The home page shows a summary: how many transactions are labeled, how many still need attention, and a feed of recent activity. There is also an amber banner at the top saying how many days are left before the books close for the month.
Click the "Needs Your Input" card. This takes you to the Review Queue.
In the Review Queue, transactions are grouped into three colors:
- Red (Critical) - The agent has no confidence and needs help.
- Amber (Needs Review) - The agent has a guess but it is not confident.
- Green (Resolved) - Already handled.
Click Review on a red item, like the wire transfer to Spencer Chen. A side drawer slides in. You will see:
- The agent's reasoning in a blue box (a one-line explanation of why it is unsure).
- The proposed category and the confidence score (color-coded).
- Buttons to either help the agent, confirm the category, or override it.
Click "Help me categorize this". A small box pops up where you can type a short note (for example, "this is a salary draw"). Submit it. The drawer moves to the next step and shows the new category. There is a toggle that says "Save rule for this vendor going forward". Leave it on and the agent will remember this for next time. The drawer marks the item resolved and the transaction now shows up in green.
You can also click "Override category" instead. That gives you a dropdown of every category to pick from.
Click Bookkeeper in the top-right. The menu on the left changes. You now have a Rules tab and a Review Queue with bulk actions.
Open the Rules tab. You will see the rules the agent has learned, who created each rule, how many times it has been used, and how many hours it has saved. Click Add Rule in the top-right. You can build a new rule by picking a vendor, an optional memo keyword, the direction (money in or money out), and the category. The drawer shows a preview in plain English so you know what the rule will do.
Now go back to the Review Queue as the bookkeeper. Tick the checkboxes next to a few items. A bar appears at the bottom with bulk actions like Mark as Reviewed or Assign to SBO. This is how a bookkeeper handles many items at once.
Click CPA in the top-right. CPAs do not usually fix transactions. They review the final reports and file taxes. Click the Reports tab. You will see a draft Profit & Loss (P&L) statement.
Click any line in the report, like Advertising. A panel slides in showing the actual transactions that add up to that number. Click any of those transactions and the drawer opens in a read-only view. If something looks wrong, click "Flag for review" and type a reason. This sends it back to the bookkeeper to fix before the books are closed.
There is also an amber call-out near the top that lists transactions that were left out of the report because they are still uncategorized. Click View to see them.
A few other things worth clicking on:
- Transactions tab - The full list of every transaction with filters for status and category. This is the master ledger.
- Activity feed on the home page - A timeline of everything that happened recently. Each event is color-coded by who did it (agent, SBO, bookkeeper, CPA).
- Drill-down inside the P&L - Every number in the report is clickable, so you can always see what makes up a total.
Here is the short list of flows the prototype demonstrates. Each one ties back to a job-to-be-done from the PRD.
For the Small Business Owner
- See a summary of the month and what still needs attention.
- Open the Review Queue and resolve transactions the agent flagged.
- Read the agent's reasoning before accepting a category.
- Override a category to whatever they think is correct.
- Add a short note to help the agent re-categorize.
- Save a rule so the same vendor is labeled the same way next time.
- Preview the draft P&L report at any time.
For the Bookkeeper
- See a dashboard of how close the books are to being finalized.
- Bulk-review and bulk-assign transactions to the SBO.
- View, create, edit, disable, and delete categorization rules.
- See which rules are AI-suggested vs. human-created and how often each rule is used.
- Drill into the P&L to verify the numbers before close.
For the CPA
- See the draft P&L for the period.
- Drill from any line item down to the underlying transactions.
- Flag a transaction for the bookkeeper to look at again, with a reason.
- See call-outs about anything excluded from the draft.
Cross-cutting features
- A confidence score and a one-line reason on every transaction.
- Visual color cues (red / amber / green) so a non-accountant can scan the list quickly.
- Inline learning - the moment you correct the agent, it offers to remember the fix.
- Role switcher to flip between SBO, Bookkeeper, and CPA without losing context.
Everything in the prototype is fake. The company, the people, the bank transactions, and the dollar amounts are all made up for the demo. Nothing connects to a real bank or a real tax system. The prototype is meant to show how the product would feel to use, not to actually keep books.
Bookkeep42 - Transaction categorization prototype.html- The prototype. Open this in a browser.PRD - AI Agent for categorizing transactions.pdf- The product requirement document this prototype is based on.
If you have questions or feedback on the prototype, please reach out on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanaveer-kadapatti/