Prosaic is an AI-native general ledger, designed specifically for accountants and bookkeepers.

Nick Houldsworth and Rowan Oulton started Prosaic in early 2023, after a conversation with their own accountant about how much data was still being processed by hand despite years of cloud accounting. ChatGPT had just launched. Their first experiments at reading bank transaction data with AI turned hours of repetitive work into minutes, paired with expert review.

Both founders come from companies we have backed previously. Nick was the first employee and CMO at Vend, and went on to run the Xero App Store. Rowan was Vend’s first front end engineer, and later an early senior engineer at Slack. We’re excited to back this team on their next venture.

Prosaic began as a simple expense add-on to existing accounting software. As they onboarded early firms and spoke to hundreds more about price, features and the slow pace of AI automation, they concluded that solving the problem properly meant building a new ledger from the ground up. That is what they did: official open banking connections, AI reconciliation, GST workflows and year-end reporting in one place, built for the volume of rentals, sole traders, simple companies and trusts that fill a firm’s compliance calendar. The aim was the simplicity of the tools firms used to love, like BankLink, rebuilt for how the work gets done with AI.

Prosaic’s backers now include BankLink co-founder Malcolm MacDonald, MYOB co-founder Craig Winkler and iFirm founder Mike Chisholm. Much of the last generation of accounting software is behind the company setting out to succeed it.

Connected Accountants in Wellington show what changes. Home office deductions that used to be reconstructed at year end now go through as part of the normal GST run, around $425 a month for one client, which removes the year-end recalculation and cuts admin for every client on the books. As director Kevin Summerhays puts it: “Prosaic changes the conversation from us chasing clients, to them coming to ask about how we can optimise their returns.”

More than 60 accounting firms now manage over a thousand clients in Prosaic, among them Fantail Finances, Real Chartered Accountants and Rightway.