Month-End Close Automation for a 1,500-Order Online Store

The client is an accounting firm in Bulgaria. The automation serves one of the firm's own clients: an online retailer growing quickly through its own web store, handling between 1,000 and 1,500 orders every month.

The shop gets paid through every channel you would expect. Card and wallet processors pay out a whole day of orders as one batch. Wise and the bank carry transfers. National courier networks take cash on delivery and pass it on days later, tied to waybill reports. Returns produce credit notes and offsets, and each one must be traced to its original order, which sometimes sits in the prior fiscal year. Bookkeeping runs in AJUR, an older Bulgarian accounting system whose only way in is its own import file format.

The price of doing it by hand

• Effort grew with order count, the fee did not. For a small firm, each sale meant more matching and more posting.
• Peak months broke the close. Campaigns and seasonal spikes doubled volume right when the books were due to close.
• Cash on delivery leaked. A courier remittance that does not line up with its waybills easily disappears in the volume.
• Returns that span year-end. If a credit note cannot be tied to its order, two fiscal years come out wrong.

• Up to 1,500 orders, a full month, reconciled and posted in less than two minutes: 12 import files and roughly 2,300 accounting lines.
• Automatic matching covers 98% of sale records, and postings are 100% accurate. The other 2% are custom bank transactions that carry no description to match against. They come through as a short list for review.
• In production for eight months.
• Roughly 192 hours of manual reconciliation saved per year, by the firm's own cautious estimate, with potential to double that.
• The team now works differently. A re-run is safe and costs nothing, so they run the month early, review the exceptions, correct the source data and run again.
• The same framework now covers more than one client of the firm. Each new build reuses a large share of the first one.

The risk that creeps up

Orders grow. New payment or courier channels appear. A manual close slips a bit further behind each month, and nobody sees it until year-end. Automation that grows with volume removes that ceiling before you reach it.