Pearland Coffee Roasters runs three coffee shops and a roastery. Their books lived in Xero, and every month someone stitched together exports from Frost Bank, Chase, Square, and Stripe by hand. It worked until they fell behind, and then it really didn't. The January–February close took weeks. By late spring there were 600+ transactions across five systems with nothing posted.

We moved them off Xero onto a self-hosted ERP running on hardware they own - no subscription, no rented seat, their data on their server. Then we built an engine that pulls from all four sources through live connections, matches transactions against the ledger using fifty learned patterns, posts what it's certain of, and queues the rest for a human.

First pass: 1,403 transactions, 44 patterns, $2.13M in activity. Books balance to zero. Frost and Chase tie to the bank at every close. The weeks-long manual close is gone.

Most "just connect your bank" pitches skip the part where you actually have to qualify to connect your bank. We did it properly - security and data-retention policies, thirteen attestations - and it passed.

Most small businesses are one bad month away from a backlog they can't clear. The backlog doesn't have to be a permanent condition.