structero.

Small manufacturers keep books with holes in them. Structero finds the holes.

An audit and intelligence platform that takes one accounting export, reconstructs the transactions that should exist, and shows every one that is missing, mispriced, or late.

This is a work in progress, not a finished product. The audit engine is built and validated. The application around it is designed but not built. This page is here to show the idea and the working prototype, nothing more.


The problem

The general ledger records what happened, not what should have happened

A small manufacturer runs on QuickBooks and a lot of habit. Work orders get opened and never closed, so work-in-process sits on the balance sheet overstating inventory. Vendors bill for material nobody confirmed receiving. Invoices go out for goods that were never shipped, recognizing revenue that has not been earned.

None of this shows up as an error, because from the ledger's point of view nothing is wrong. A missing transaction leaves no trace. You cannot search for a row that was never written.

Their accountant finds some of it, once a year, by hand.


The mechanic

Reconstruct the chain, then compare it to reality

Every business transaction belongs to a chain. A purchase order should be followed by a receipt, then a vendor bill, then a payment. If you know the chain, you can generate the transactions that ought to exist from the ones that do, then match the two sets and read off the difference.

What they give us
  • One general-ledger export
  • Accounts payable and receivable
  • No integration, no install
What they get back
  • Reconstructed operational flows
  • Every gap, priced in dollars
  • Plain-language root cause

That distance is the product. The reaction we are designing for is "how did you get all of that out of the file I sent you?"

Procurement, purchase to payment
PO RCPT BILL BILLPMT

Gap: the bill posted with no receipt on record, so material was paid for that nobody confirmed arriving. The bill itself is also over the purchase-order price.

Production, work order lifecycle
WO MAT-ISSUE LABOR OVERHEAD WO-CLOSE

Gap: the work order never closed, so its work-in-process is stuck open and inventory is overstated until someone notices.

Sales, order to cash
SO SHIP INV PMT DEPOSIT

Gap: an invoice recognized revenue with no shipment behind it, which is a revenue-recognition risk the auditors will care about.

✓ matched ▢ missing (dashed) ▲ variance ○ optional

The audit arithmetic is deterministic SQL, so no figure is ever invented. The Claude application programming interface is used only to infer the dependency rules from a new client's data and to write the plain-language explanation of a variance. Numbers never come from a model.


What it finds

The four gaps that show up in almost every set of books

GapWhat it meansWhy it costs money
Bill, no receipt A vendor bill with no receiving transaction behind it Paying for material nobody confirmed arriving
Work order never closed Production started, no closing entry Work-in-process stuck open, inventory overstated
Invoice, no shipment Revenue recognized with nothing shipped Revenue-recognition exposure at audit
Payment never deposited Customer paid, cash never landed Cash unaccounted for, reconciliation breaks

Alongside these, the engine flags price variance (billed above the purchase-order rate), quantity variance (more material issued than the bill of materials called for), and timing variance (paid late against terms).


See it

A clickable prototype, about six minutes

Structero audit funnel

The four screens an analyst moves through, on an invented sample company. Every figure in it is dummy data chosen to make one coherent scenario legible, not a real client result.

Open the prototype →
  1. 1Summary. Total exposure for the period, findings ranked by dollars.
  2. 2Worklist. Every issue as something you can act on. The filters work, try suppressing noise.
  3. 3Chain. One order drawn as a flow. Dashed nodes are missing, ghosted nodes have not happened yet.
  4. 4Node. Actual beside theoretical, with the variance between them. Click any node to get here.

Controls marked "Rewire (roadmap)" are deliberately disabled. They mark where the next capability lands, and they are not built.


Who it is for

Built for the analyst, aimed at the accountant

The person at the keyboard is an analyst working through a client's books, either inside the manufacturer or at the accounting firm that keeps them. The controller or general manager is who introduces the tool, and the finance lead is who has to believe the output.

That shapes the interface more than anything else. The first screen leads with the biggest findings in plain language rather than a table of records, because the first run has to be legible to someone who did not ask for it. Everything below that first screen is for the analyst who then has to work the list.

The comparison point is a consulting engagement that ends in a static slide deck. The intent here is something durable instead: re-runnable each period, drillable down to the individual transaction, with a record of who reviewed what.


Where it stands

A validated engine and an architecture, not yet a product

Being straight about this, because it is the thing worth talking through. The core mechanic is proven and the platform around it is designed but unbuilt.

38
Tests passing
3,700
Rows ingested
10 / 10
Seeded gaps caught
3
Chains modelled

✓ Built and working

  • Ingestion from Excel accounting exports
  • Rule engine and theoretical-chain builder
  • Matching and variance classification
  • Validated on real export data plus a synthetic manufacturer with deliberately seeded gaps
  • Production database schema with tenant isolation
  • The interface prototype linked above

▢ Not built yet

  • Any web application: no upload, no login, no hosted interface
  • The application programming interface layer
  • Authentication and real tenant scoping
  • Rule inference from an unseen client's data
  • Everything on the roadmap below

Honest one-line status: end of discovery, start of build. The next concrete step is the first vertical slice, upload through to report in a browser.


Roadmap

Reveal, then Refine, then Rewire

Ordered by decision, not by wishlist. Each stage assumes the one above it.

NOW Revealprototype live
Ingest, reconstruct, match, and present the gaps. This is the foundation and the thing that has to work first.
NEXT Rewire
Draft the missing transactions, including accruals before month-end close, as suggested entries the analyst accepts or rejects. The data model is already shaped for it.
THEN Pro-forma financials
Projected trial balance, profit and loss, and balance sheet once the suggested entries are accepted. Answers "what do my books look like when this is fixed?"
LATER Predictive and what-if
Knock-on effects across key indicators, and historical simulation. The furthest out and the least specified.

Worth arguing about

What I would want a second opinion on