What we build
General Invoices is a desktop app that automates invoice and receipt data entry into the Excel workbook a small business or bookkeeper already uses. It reads each document, learns the layout of the existing workbook, and writes each entry into the right cells, previewed, backed up and approved by the user first. The workbook never leaves the user's computer.
It is deliberately not an accounting system. It does not do bank feeds, reconciliation, payroll or tax. It does one job, the typing, and it does it into the file you already trust.
Why it exists
Plenty of businesses run perfectly well on a spreadsheet the owner built themselves. It has the tabs they need, the totals they check, and nothing they don't. The one thing wrong with it is the hours spent retyping invoices into it, and the standard advice for that problem is to abandon the spreadsheet for software that asks you to migrate everything, learn a new system, and hand your books to someone's cloud.
That trade is bad for a lot of people, and the tools that could have helped them mostly don't try: receipt-capture products live inside accounting platforms, and OCR tools hand you a CSV and wish you luck. We built the missing piece, automation that adapts to the workbook rather than the other way round, and we built it for the most sceptical audience there is: people who don't trust software with their books, and are right not to.
How it's built
- Local-first. The workbook is read and written only on your computer. The engine that touches it listens on your own machine only, with a secret generated fresh each launch.
- AI reads; deterministic code writes. Claude, Anthropic's model, reads invoices and a masked summary of your workbook's layout with every number, amount and date blanked out. Everything that changes your file is done by ordinary, tested code, never by the model.
- A verification harness is the sole authority on whether a write is safe. Every plan is applied to a copy first, checked, and refused if a check fails. The real file is written through a backup, a temporary file and an atomic swap.
- Tested against real books, not just fixtures. Copies of genuine small-business workbooks and a corpus of ten further common layouts are driven through the real code path on every meaningful change. The numbers are published.
Our rules
- Never corrupt a workbook. This is the design goal, and everything else is downstream of it.
- Never be silently wrong. If the app is unsure, it warns; if it cannot express your layout safely, it refuses with a reason. A guess that looks plausible is worse than an honest refusal.
- Refuse, don't force. A workbook open in Excel, a file changed since approval, a duplicate invoice: in each case the app stops and asks.
- Send nothing that doesn't need to go. Documents go out to be read. Your book, and the numbers in it, do not.
- No fake proof. No invented testimonials, no made-up star ratings, no logos we haven't earned. Until real customers say real things, the evidence is the engineering.
Where we are
General Invoices is not released yet. It will launch on macOS first, with a Windows version planned. The full local write path (open a workbook, learn its layout, confirm, dry-run, read invoices, plan, approve, post) is built and tested end to end. What remains before general availability is the ordinary provisioning: signing certificates, billing, hosting. The waitlist is open.
Contact
General Invoices is built by Agen-Tech, based in the United States. Email max@agen-tech.com. If you run an accounting firm and want a plan for many client workbooks, say roughly how many and we'll take it from there. If you're a journalist, analyst, or building a comparison of invoice-automation tools and want accurate details, ask. We'd rather you had the facts than a guess.
Keep your spreadsheet. Lose the data entry.
General Invoices isn't released yet. Join the waitlist and we'll email you when it launches.