AI for small business · founding clients now forming
AI keeps your back office running.
A real person keeps it right.
Mail, documents, scheduling, follow-ups, your tech stack, and yes, your books too: West Grove AI drafts the busywork every day, and real people review what matters and keep it right. You get your evenings back without handing your business to a faceless app.
Software automates. Nobody answers for it.
The last few years produced a wave of app-based automation tools, and one famous collapse in the bookkeeping corner of it: thousands of small businesses woke up one morning in December 2024 to find their books platform gone overnight. The lesson is not that AI is bad at the job. It is that your operations need an owner.
Your mail, your documents, your tools, and your books should live in accounts you control, with a practice that answers for the result. Not inside a venture-backed app with a runway, and not a download you have to configure yourself. We come in, set it up, and train your team to run it.
How it works
Four moving parts. Two of them are people.
We set it up
We configure the automation on your real accounts and tools ourselves, and train your team to use it. No download, no dashboard to figure out alone.
AI drafts
Mail and documents sorted and filed. Transactions pre-categorized. Reminders, follow-ups, and routine replies drafted. A plain-English summary of what happened, prepared automatically.
A human decides
A practice reviews everything that matters before it goes out or the books close. Judgment calls stay human. You get a person to call, not a support queue.
You own everything
Built on the tools you already use, QuickBooks Online included, under your own accounts. If we disappeared tomorrow, your documents, your books, your data, and your automations would still work. No lock-in, ever.
Demo
One day in the books
Books are one example of a pattern that runs across everything we automate, from your mail to your admin: AI drafts, then a person reviews. This is one day at Copperleaf Coffee Roasters, a business we invented for this demo: a roaster with a cafe, an online store, and wholesale accounts. Money lands, documents get parsed and matched, everything gets categorized with its reason stated in plain English, and the day closes into a P&L, a balance sheet, and the dashboard an owner actually reads. Every number traces, and it all ties to the cent.
Morning: twenty-one things hit the bank.
Watch each line land, then get categorized: a category, a confidence, and the reason in plain English. Three stop for a person, and each one earns its stop. Click the Shopify payout to see why a bank deposit never equals a day of sales.
| descriptor | amount | drafted as | conf | verdict |
|---|
Why today's Shopify deposit is Tuesday's sales
Card money settles on a two-business-day lag, batched and net of fees. Tuesday's fourteen orders became one Thursday deposit. The refund's processing fee is never returned, so it stays in the books as a real cost.
Clearing account after settlement: $0.00. Nothing leaked, nothing double-counted. Today's own online orders are in the same pipeline and land Monday.
Midday: the paper catches up.
Documents come in by email and photo, get scanned, parsed, and matched to the money that already moved. Watch each page get read: the match logic shows its work, including the duplicate it caught.
Afternoon: where the money actually went.
Categorization is not one bucket of expenses. The day rolls up into a real cash flow statement, and every line traces to the rows in beat one.
Today's outbound dollars, in one bar
Hover any segment for its amount.
The day as a cash flow statement
Operating, investing, financing. It starts at this morning's cash and lands, to the cent, on the number the dashboard shows tonight.
End of day: the close is a review, not a dig.
The matching happened all day, so closing the day is confirming work already done. The drafted net will come down when payroll posts; that is expected and stated, not hidden.
Today's P&L, drafted
Waiting on a person, and said so
What the balance sheet felt
The dashboard the owner actually reads.
Month to date, updated tonight. Owner numbers, not accountant numbers, and every figure traces to the transactions behind it.
Revenue by channel, MTD
Revenue vs expenses, day by day
This month so far. Today shows the drafted numbers, before payroll posts. Heavy-bills days are timing, not trouble; the month is the signal.
A/R aging
Nothing over 30 days. The one open invoice from today is current.
The day in plain English, drafted by the AI
Fictional business, synthetic data. The holds are the product: payroll always posts by hand, high-dollar judgments wait for a person, and anything only the owner can answer stops instead of guessing. A human reviews and closes; every number reconciles to the drafted ledger.
Services
Four ways to start
Monthly
AI Back-Office Management
Your ongoing AI back office: mail and document triage, scheduling upkeep, routine replies drafted, and yes, your books too, AI-prepared and human-reviewed with a plain-English monthly narrative of what changed and why.
Project
Tech-Stack & Workflow Automation
We look at every tool you already pay for and wire them together: invoice follow-ups drafted for your one-click send, appointment reminders, document intake, a weekly owner dashboard. Documented and handed over. You own it.
Add-on
Paperless Mailroom & Document Intake
Email or photo anything that comes in: invoices, contracts, forms, receipts, all of it, to a dedicated address. It gets extracted, categorized, filed, and the exceptions flagged for human review every week. The mailroom, replaced.
One-time
AI Admin Assistant Setup
A one-time build of your own email triage, meeting scheduling, and follow-up automation, plus a training session. The low-commitment way to see what this feels like.
Every number is published below. Fixed fees, never hourly, and you know the number before we start.
Pricing
Real numbers, up front
Fixed fees, never hourly. The number below is the number on your engagement letter, with the scope stated before we start.
Monthly
AI Back-Office Management
$750per month
- Mail, documents, and scheduling handled every week
- Your books, AI-prepared, human-reviewed, and closed
- A plain-English monthly narrative of what changed and why
Project
Tech-Stack & Workflow Automation
$2,500typical project
Optional care plan $225 per month: we watch it, fix it, tune it.
- We map your tech stack and wire the pieces together
- One to three working automations on your own tooling
- Documented and handed over; you own it
Add-on
Paperless Mailroom & Document Intake
$145per month
- A dedicated intake address for anything that comes in: invoices, contracts, forms, receipts
- Extracted, categorized, and filed automatically
- Exceptions flagged weekly for human review
One-time
AI Admin Assistant Setup
$995flat, one-time
- Email triage, scheduling, and follow-up automation on your accounts
- A training session so you actually use it
- The low-commitment way to start
Founding clients
Our first engagements take 25% off the first three months (monthly services) or off the project price (builds), in exchange for a written case study. Real results first; then we publish them.
Calculator
How many hours is your back office eating?
Drag the sliders. The estimate is illustrative, not a quote or a promise, and the math is shown so you can argue with it.
7 to 11 hours back per month
The line we hold
What we automate. What we never will.
The AI drafts
- Mail and document sorting, as a draft with a confidence score
- Transaction categorization and receipt filing
- Invoice reminders and routine replies
- The plain-English weekly or monthly summary
- Anomaly and duplicate flags
A human decides, always
- Tax judgments and financial decisions
- Payroll approvals
- Moving money, any amount, any direction
- Sending anything external without your review
- Final calls on ambiguous or high-stakes items, including closing the month
That split goes in writing, in every engagement. The AI drafts; it does not decide.
Why us
We automated our own back office first
West Grove AI comes out of a working practice that automated its own back office first. Before offering any of this to clients, we ran it on ourselves: our mail, our scheduling, our lead follow-up, our document handling, our tech stack, and our reporting all run on the same kind of automation we install. Our workflows are descendants of ones we run every day.
Questions
Asked and answered straight
Is this a software subscription?
No. It is a service delivered by a real practice: we set up the automation on your accounts, train your team to use it, and automation does the grunt work under our ongoing supervision. You are not buying an app and configuring it alone; you are hiring a practice that comes in, builds it, and stays on it.
Is this just bookkeeping software?
No. Books are one piece of it. West Grove AI handles your mail and documents, your scheduling, your follow-ups, and the tools you already use, with your books folded in as one more thing that gets the same AI-drafts, human-reviews treatment. If you only need accounting help, this is more than you need. We will tell you that straight instead of selling you the whole package.
Who sees my data?
Your books and documents stay in your own accounts, QuickBooks Online and your inbox included, under your login, with access you grant and can revoke. Documents and transactions will move through business API connections under commercial terms, never consumer chat apps, and those data-handling commitments go in writing in the engagement letter.
What happens when the AI gets something wrong?
Nothing the AI touches goes out or posts on its own, so a mistake surfaces as a draft, not as a done thing. Every draft carries a confidence score, low-confidence and high-stakes items stop for a person automatically, and a human reviews before anything closes or sends. You can see this working in the demo above: three of twenty-four items held, each with the reason stated.
Do I have to switch tools?
No. We build on the tools you already use wherever we can, QuickBooks Online included, and everything we set up lives in accounts you own.
What if you disappear tomorrow?
Your documents, your books, your data, and your automations keep working, because they were never ours to hold. That is a deliberate design choice, and it is the whole lesson of the December 2024 platform collapse.
What does it cost?
The numbers are on this page, in the pricing section. Fixed fees, never hourly, no meters, and founding clients take 25% off their first three months or their project price in exchange for a written case study.
Where are you?
Remote, by design. Clients are wherever they are; the team works out of Southern California.
Founding clients
Get in before the doors open
Leave your name and we will reach out personally as founding-client spots open. No spam, no list-selling, no obligation.