Meridian Books reads a year of Canadian receipts and books them against CRA rules — HST by province, input tax credits, meals at 50%. Then it does the thing no other tool will: it shows you exactly what it couldn't read.
By invitation · Built for Canadian bookkeepers and accountants
Every file exports to an Excel workbook and to a client-ready report, to a QuickBooks Desktop journal (IIF) and a Sage 50 General Journal, and to CSV for QuickBooks Online and Xero. FreshBooks and Wave take a general-purpose CSV. Each carries the coding as you approved it; the fields every accounting package accepts differ, so the app shows you what each format includes before you export.
A client hands over a bag of paper. Somebody types each line into a spreadsheet, decides the category, works out the HST, and hopes nothing was missed. It takes hours. And the mistakes are the expensive kind: an input tax credit denied for a missing registration number, a reassessment, a figure nobody can trace back to the paper it came from.
The whole category promises “automatic,” which means it has to hide the leftovers. But the risk was never the receipt it reads correctly — it's the one it gets wrong confidently.
Meridian Books books what it can defend and brings you what it can't, with the paper's own values already filled in and the one unreadable field marked in red. That's the difference between a tool that finishes and a tool that pretends to.
Every booked row has to reconcile to the receipt's own printed figures. No tax line on the paper means no tax claimed. When a scan is unreadable it says so — “I couldn't read this” is an answer it's allowed to give.
Every figure points back to the document it came from — in review, in the tax check, and in your workbook.
Decide once. A re-run never asks you again or quietly overwrites you.
It doesn't ask about every receipt — only the ones it genuinely couldn't read, with the scan beside them.
Reading “$86.40” off a receipt is the easy part. Knowing it's a restaurant meal for a landscaping company — deductible at 50%, HST at Ontario's rate, and not a wholesale purchase — is the job.
GST and QST split correctly when the receipt prints them combined.
PDFs, scans, phone photos — a few hundred at a time. No sorting first, no renaming, no separating by month.
Each receipt against Canadian rules: the province's HST, the category, the input tax credit, business or personal. A multi-receipt page is split into its parts.
Only the rows it genuinely couldn't read — the scan beside them, the values it did read already filled, the missing one in red.
A client report, an Excel workbook, or CSV for QuickBooks Online or Xero — with out-of-period rows kept visible in their own section, never dropped.
We don't publish an accuracy percentage.
Every tool in this category claims somewhere between 95% and 99.9%. None of them publish the method, the sample, or what the failures looked like — so the number tells you nothing, and a bookkeeper can't audit it.
We'd rather show the work. Each booked row must reconcile to the paper's own printed figures or it doesn't post silently — it comes to you. The honest test isn't our number, it's your file: run a client you've already closed by hand, and compare.
What we hold is encrypted at rest. The original scan is deleted the moment it has been read — we don't build an archive of your clients' paperwork.
The reading itself is done by Anthropic's model over an encrypted connection. That step runs on their infrastructure, and their terms for it are strict: nothing is kept, and nothing is used to train anything. We say so plainly because you are answering to your own client, and you should hear it from us rather than work it out later.
Where your data lives and where it is read is spelled out in full in our Privacy Policy — read it before you upload anything.
Documents are processed to do your work. Nothing is used to train a model.
One accountant never sees another's files. Ask, and your data is deleted.
The objection we hear first, and the fair one: you can't hand a client's paperwork to a stranger's server. So the answer is architecture, not a promise — encryption at rest, a wall between accounts, and no archive of scans once they're read.
No seats, no monthly minimum. A document is one receipt or invoice, read and booked.
Prices are in Canadian dollars and do not include HST. HST is added at checkout at your province's rate.
Pilot accounts start with a free allowance, so you can run a real client file before you decide anything.
Meridian Books is in private pilot and access is by invitation. Tell us a little about your practice and we'll send you an invite.
We'd rather you test it against a client you've already closed by hand. That's the only comparison that means anything.
Meridian Books is a bookkeeping tool, not a tax advisor. It applies CRA rules as we understand them, and it shows you what it couldn't read — but every figure it produces is yours to review before it goes anywhere. Filings, elections, and the final call on any treatment remain the responsibility of the bookkeeper, accountant, or business owner using it. Nothing here or in the product is tax, accounting, or legal advice.