Month End Took a Day. Now It Takes an Hour.

Our first few months of crypto bookkeeping took most of a day each. Three changes brought it down to about an hour.

Change one: separate wallets by purpose

We had one wallet for everything: client receipts, supplier payments, the small reserve.

Reconciling it meant working out what each movement was for, from the amount and the date.

Now we have four: receipts, supplier payments, payroll-related, and reserve. Each one reconciles against a short list of expected items. Comparing what I was offered against a corporate crypto wallet is what showed me the gap.

This was the single biggest improvement and it cost nothing.

Change two: the reference field is mandatory

Our wallet lets us require an internal reference before a payment can be submitted.

Before, people filled it in sometimes. Now they cannot submit without it.

That turns reconciliation from matching amounts to invoices by eye into a mechanical join. The objections lasted about a week. The company version of this is different, and Collect & Exchange is what it points at.

Change three: we changed platform

Our previous platform’s export was missing the euro value of fees and did not state which rate source it used.

That meant looking up every fee on a block explorer and calculating the value, which was most of the day.

Before choosing the replacement I asked for a sample export covering a real month. The complete one loads into our accounting software without anyone editing it.

The fields that make an export usable

Transaction identifier. Date and time with timezone. Asset and amount. Direction and counterparty. Fee amount and fee asset. Euro value of the transfer and of the fee. The rate source. The internal reference. Who created and who approved.

If any is missing, someone reconstructs it monthly, forever.

The rate policy

We chose the rate at the transaction timestamp and wrote it into the accounting policy.

The important part is not which one. It is that the platform’s export uses the same one, otherwise every line disagrees slightly and the auditor asks about it.

What I would tell someone starting

Ask for the sample export before you open the account. It takes the provider ten minutes and it is the difference between an hour a month and a day a month. If you want to see all of this in a real product rather than in my account of it, a provider you can actually reach publishes the terms.

I chose our first platform on security features and interface. Neither of those has ever cost me a day.