STINGER BOUND

Bookkeeping for contractors, drafted before you sit down.

Annabelle reads the job, the invoice, the receipt, and drafts the entry — for a bar, a trade shop, or a salon. Confirm from the desk or the phone, and each house keeps its own name on the door.

Onboarding, on the seeded demo house.

Bound onboarding screen: 'Annabelle proposes. You post.' with a business-type picker — Venue (rooms, tabs, distributors), Trades (draws, retainage, jobs), Shop (chairs, booth, retail) — a house name and city field, an Open the Books button, and seeded demo houses The Marlin and The Yard

A venue's books, a trade's books, and a shop's books aren't the same book — until Bound.

One set of books. Three kinds of business.

A venue thinks in rooms, tabs, and distributors. A trade thinks in draws, retainage, and jobs. A shop thinks in booths, chairs, and retail. Bound asks which house you're running once, at setup, then speaks that language everywhere else — underneath, it's one set of books.

Annabelle drafts, you post

She reads the job, the invoice, the receipt — and writes the entry. It sits as a proposal until a human approves it. Nothing posts to the books on her authority alone.

Multi-house from day one

Run The Marlin and The Yard — the same seeded demo houses — out of the same account. Each keeps its own ledger, its own name on the door — Bound doesn't blend them.

What does AI bookkeeping software actually draft for you?

Proposal drafting

Full formatted client proposals, ready to review — not a template with blanks, an actual draft built from the job.

Month-end & close checklists

Reads the month, categorizes the expenses, runs the close checklist. The tedious first pass is done before you sit down.

Live finance snapshots

Revenue, expenses, cash, AR and AP on a running snapshot — not a report you have to remember to pull.

Invoicing & expense tracking

Invoice creation, expense tracking, P&L and balance sheet, synced through QuickBooks Online — plus customer, invoice, and payment records for retail floors on Lightspeed.

How does Bound keep bookkeeping approvals human?

An approval queue, not a suggestion

Anything that touches money or the books sits behind an approval queue before it's final — a rule enforced on the tools themselves, not a suggestion in a prompt.

A second read before it's irreversible

A quality gate reviews proposals before anything gets sent or posted — a second look before the door closes on an entry.

An audit trail, not a black box

Every approval, every post, every close — logged with who and when. The books stay yours to defend.

Bound against QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Wave.

Bound doesn't beat a dedicated accounting platform on every row — it has no bank feed of its own yet and no native payroll. What it does that none of the three do: a mandatory draft-then-approve gate on every entry, and multiple full houses under one account without a second subscription.

Feature Bound QuickBooks OnlineXeroWave
AI drafts entries from job/invoice/receipt; a human must approve before anything posts Yes Partial — Intuit Assist drafts some entries for reviewPartial — Smart Document Capture drafts a bill for reviewno — auto-categorization only, no draft-and-approve step
One account runs multiple full businesses, each with its own separate ledger Yes Separate paid subscription per companyUnclear from public pageSeparate paid subscription per business (Pro tier)
Invoicing Yes YesYesYes
Expense tracking Yes YesYes on Growing/Established tiersYes
P&L and Balance Sheet reports Yes YesYesYes
Automatic bank feed & reconciliation No YesYesPro tier only, not on free Starter
Native payroll included (not a paid add-on) Roadmap no — separate paid add-onno — via Gusto add-onno — separate paid add-on
Extra monthly fee for the bookkeeping itself No $19–38/mo~$25/moFree–$19/mo

Competitor figures pulled from each vendor's own pricing/feature pages, 2026-09-03. Bound features drawn from what's live today per this page and the internal capability catalog.

Name the house. Annabelle opens the books.

Tell Bound whether you're running a venue, a trade, or a shop — it sets up the ledger to match. Add a second house whenever you're ready; the name on the door stays theirs.

Related: pair Bound with Cage to track inventory costs straight into the books, or see how it fits inside the full Stinger platform.