How Book&Entries Uses Cheetah to Stay Lean Without Losing Depth

Most accounting firms scale by hiring. More clients, more files, more juniors. The margin maths works until it doesn't — and then you're running an ops problem dressed up as a practice.

Book&Entries took a different path. They decided early that growth shouldn't mean headcount; it should mean leverage. To pull that off, they had to treat their recurring reporting work as infrastructure rather than tasks — and build (or buy) the automation to match.

This is a short case study on how they did it, working with Cheetah across three phases of reporting automation.

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Phase One: Accounting Schedules

The first problem was the unglamorous middle of every engagement: the working papers.

Every file had the same supporting schedules behind it — prepayments, accruals, deposits, other debtors, other creditors, the fixed asset register. None of them were hard. All of them were tedious. Pull the ledger. Filter the movements. Work out what's prepaid vs expensed, what's accrued vs paid, what's been deposited or is still outstanding. Then rebuild it in a spreadsheet that looks like every other spreadsheet the firm produces.

Done once, it's an afternoon. Done across a full client book, monthly, it's a silent tax on every senior on the team.

Cheetah rebuilt these six schedules as automated reports. Each one reads directly from the client's Xero, applies Book&Entries' own logic — how they categorise movements, how they handle partial periods, how they treat reversals — and produces the exact Google Sheet output the firm uses in its working papers.

The time savings were the obvious win. The less obvious one was consistency: every senior, every client, every month, got the same structure. Review became faster because the output was predictable. Onboarding a new junior became faster because there was less firm-specific mechanical knowledge to transfer.

Phase Two: Unaudited Financial Statements

The schedules were the warm-up. The real test was the unaudited financial statements.

UFS is the kind of deliverable that keeps senior staff late. It's long, highly formatted, full of cross-references, and sensitive to getting even small things wrong — note numbers that drift, a prior-year column that stops tying, a directors' interest table that misses a movement. Clients expect it looking polished and consistent. Regulators expect it tying perfectly. The team preparing it expects to spend a weekend on every one.

Cheetah built Book&Entries an end-to-end UFS generator. It produces a fully formatted Google Doc: title page, statement by directors, balance sheet, P&L, statement of changes in equity, cash flow statement, and a full set of notes — all pulled from Xero, all mapped through Book&Entries' own chart-of-accounts logic, all cross-referenced correctly.

The notes were the hardest part to get right. Note numbering that stays sequential regardless of which optional sections apply. Plant and equipment schedules that reconcile to the balance sheet. Directors' interest disclosures that pick up movements in the right periods. The kind of detail that makes a UFS either quietly correct or painfully wrong.

What used to be a multi-day exercise per entity became a generation click followed by a review pass. The deliverable got better — more consistent, fewer formatting slips — while taking a fraction of the time.

Phase Three: Consolidation

The third phase is where the leverage really compounds.

A growing share of Book&Entries' clients run multi-entity structures — holding companies, operating subsidiaries, related-party group arrangements. Xero, famously, does not consolidate across organisations. So every group client means logging into each entity, exporting the data, reconciling intercompany balances, eliminating by hand, and rebuilding a group view in Excel every reporting cycle.

Cheetah built Book&Entries a consolidation report that handles this automatically. Pull a specified set of entities. Aggregate them. Apply the firm's elimination logic. Produce a clean group P&L and balance sheet in the firm's format.

The interesting thing about consolidation work is that it's the kind of job that historically only the largest engagements could economically justify doing well. The smaller the group, the more likely someone was quietly eating the cost or simplifying the output. Automating it changes that calculus — group reporting of a quality normally reserved for top-tier clients becomes deliverable across the book.

Why This Works

Three things stand out from watching Book&Entries operate this way.

The reporting logic is treated as infrastructure, not tasks. Every time they figured out how something should be categorised, mapped, or presented, that decision got encoded into the report — not written into a training doc nobody reads. The logic ran the same way every time, for every client, without anyone having to remember it.

Senior time went toward judgement, not assembly. Partners and managers stopped assembling schedules and started reviewing outputs. That's a better use of the most expensive hours in the firm, and it makes the review itself sharper — you're looking at the whole picture rather than reconstructing pieces.

Growth decoupled from headcount. Adding another client didn't mean adding another person. It meant adding a configuration. That's the real unlock for a firm that wants to stay small and still serve seriously.

Nothing about this is magic. Book&Entries still has to do the work of running a firm — clients, deadlines, relationships, judgement calls. What's changed is that the repeatable parts of their deliverables run automatically, in their format, with their logic. The non-repeatable parts — the advisory, the review, the conversations — get the time they actually deserve.

If you're running a lean practice and the ceiling on growth feels like "we'd need to hire" — it's worth asking which parts of your delivery are genuinely bespoke and which parts are just being rebuilt every month by someone who shouldn't be rebuilding them.

That's the space Cheetah is built to sit in. Book&Entries is one example of what happens when a firm takes it seriously. Happy to talk if it sounds like your firm too.