Introducing A2X AI Close: the long tail of month-end, reconciled in minutes

If you use A2X Core, then you’ve benefited from accurate and automated payout reconciliation for Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, TikTok Shop and PayPal. For most sellers and accounting firms, that covers the bulk of month-end.

But for scaling Shopify merchants, other payment gateways and apps need to be reconciled every month. Buy now, pay later services like Afterpay and Klarna. Marketplaces like Faire. Returns apps like Loop and Swap. Each one sends its own statement and settles through its own clearing account. To close the account you have to match the statement to your orders line by line and work out what’s fees, what’s timing and what’s wrong. Most people do it in a spreadsheet.

Introducing A2X AI Close for gateway, marketplace, and third-party Shopify app reconciliation

A2X AI Close does the matching and drafts the journal entries for the long tail of payment gateways, marketplaces, and apps that are holding back your month-end.

Take a gateway like Afterpay. Your sales and your bank deposits both run through a clearing account, and the two never quite cancel out. Afterpay takes its fees before it pays you, and some orders won’t have been paid out yet. The reconciliation is working out how much of that balance is fees and how much is still owed to you. A2X AI Close does that for you.

Here’s how it works:

1. Set up a workflow once per provider. Upload a sample statement and map each line type (payout, fee, refund, chargeback) to a GL account.
2. Each month, upload the provider’s statement. CSV or Excel, provider’s statement in its native layout.
3. A2X AI Close matches each line on the statement to a Shopify order in A2X. Each line gets one of five statuses: matched, discrepancy, dispute, incomplete or unmatched.
4. It checks both directions. As well as matching the lines on the statement, it lists the Shopify orders for the period that aren’t on it. Most are timing differences, orders fulfilled late in the month that pay out the following month, and they support the balance left in the clearing account. Any order that should have paid out and didn’t is listed separately. Those are the ones you’d never find working down a statement line by line.
5. It drafts one journal entry that moves fees and deductions out of the clearing account. The entry is dated to the last day of the statement period and you can change the date.
6. You review the lines that didn’t match, then click Post to GL. Nothing posts until you do. It posts to Xero, QuickBooks Online or NetSuite.
7. Each run exports as an Excel workpaper with the statement, the match result for each line, the unmatched orders and the journal entry. It stands on its own as close documentation for a client, a reviewer or an auditor.

Where A2X AI Close uses AI, and where it doesn’t

AI reads the statement so you don’t have to reformat it. The matching itself isn’t AI. It follows a fixed, documented formula against the order data A2X Core already holds, so the same statement gives the same result every month.

For a line that doesn’t match, select it and click Explain with AI. It pulls the order from Shopify, compares it with what A2X booked and with the line in the statement, and within a minute or two returns one of four results: no posting needed, adjustment needed, rerun needed or needs review. If it can’t work out the cause, it tells you that.

What ecommerce accounting experts LedgerGurus found in the A2X AI Close beta

Jacquelyn Vinci, Accounting Manager at LedgerGurus, ran A2X AI Close on a Shopify client’s July Faire payouts. That reconciliation used to mean, in her words,hours “murderously reviewing 300 transactions by hand.” Instead, it took 3 to 8 minutes, and gave her a month end balance..

Who A2X AI Close is for

Shopify merchants who reconcile statements like these every month, and the accountants and bookkeepers who close their books. For an accounting or bookkeeping practice, it’s one workflow per client, set up once and run every month.

A2X AI Close requirements and limits

• The orders have to run through a Shopify store connected to A2X. A2X AI Close matches against the Shopify order data A2X Core already holds.
• Supported statements today. Payment gateways: Afterpay, Clearpay, Klarna, Zip, Reach, Truemed, Sezzle, Stripe, Global-e. Marketplaces: Faire. Returns: Loop Returns, Swap Returns.
• It’s in beta. More providers are coming. If yours isn’t listed, tell us which one.

How A2X AI Close fits in the broader A2X picture

• A2X Core reconciles payouts and settlements from your sales channels.
• A2X AI Close reconciles the gateway, marketplace and returns statements around them, from the same order data.
• A2X Subledger reconciles order to cash, so any number drills down to the order.
• A2X Clarity reports profitability from the same reconciled data.

How to get access to A2X AI Close

A2X AI Close can be purchased as a standalone product (currently in beta), or is included in A2X Subledger and A2X Clarity.

Book a demo to see it in action.

A2X AI Close is part of A2X Additions, our November roundup of new features. See it in the live webinar on Thursday, November 19.