The chase is becoming an AI feature. In Portugal, nobody asks yet

Posted on Oct 20 • Originally published at gil-neto.com

In a small accounting practice there's a monthly job nobody likes. Before the books can close, someone has to chase clients for what's missing: the invoice behind a payment, the receipt for a card charge, the bank statement that never got sent. I've been on the other side of it too. My own accountant chases me to confirm invoices on e-fatura, the Portuguese tax authority's invoice portal, and I'm exactly the kind of client who answers late.

This year the chase started turning into a software feature.

So, the companies that own the ledger are taking the chase. That makes sense: the ledger already knows which transactions are missing a document.

In Portugal a lot of small practices run on TOConline, which belongs to the Ordem dos Contabilistas Certificados (OCC), the accountants' professional body. It has intake: a client emails documents to an address built from their tax number, and a filing robot matches them ( TOConline manual - the pages I found may be old). Sage has client uploads. What I couldn't find, in TOConline, Sage or Cegid, is the other half: a feature that sends the request, or the reminder, from the accountant to the client. That was a search, not an audit, so I may have missed something.

There's also a reason the written trail matters here that I haven't seen anyone frame. According to the OCC's own FAQ, an accountant whose client doesn't hand over the documents can refuse to sign the tax returns, and the evidence named for that refusal is the written communications asking the client for them. (I read the FAQ, not the statute article it cites.) So in Portugal a chase is more than an admin chore - it's also the accountant's paper trail.

I build Damasqo Flow, former Kelaro, a tool that syncs a practice's client bank accounts into the spreadsheet the practice already uses, and ties each import to the bank's own balance. It's one part of Damasqo, the set of tools I'm building around verified bank data. Last week I picked the chase as the first thing to build on top of it, and the reason is the bank feed.

A generic document request ("please send us your October documents") is turning into a commodity, and whoever owns the ledger will ship it. However, if you already hold the bank lines, you never need to chase the bank statement, which is exactly what Pennylane chases twice a month. And the ask gets specific: one question for each bank line that doesn't match anything.

bank line matched? -43,20 € · 03 Oct · CARD PAYMENT ───────▶ │ yes ──┴── no │ │ done ▼ "What is this 43,20 € on 3 October? Send the invoice to <your intake address>." │ ▼ question + reply kept per client Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Three things I like about that shape: