The VAT return started in the glovebox of the van
SunnyTaz is our own product: a freelancer's accounting reduced to a single forwarding rule, set once. The invoices still land in the inbox. Gathering them for the accountant is no longer anyone's job.
The problem
The challenge
A freelancer's accounting is not a department — it is a stolen Sunday, four times a year, right before each quarterly VAT return. The fuel receipts wait in the glovebox, printed on thermal paper that keeps fading. The electricity invoice has to be fetched from a supplier portal nobody remembers the password to; the phone bill from another. The accountant emails asking for 'whatever is missing' — which is exactly the thing the freelancer does not know is missing. None of that is accounting: it is gathering paperwork, paid for in evenings that were meant for something else. And the expensive part stays invisible: the genuine expense whose invoice nobody remembered to request, quietly left out of the deduction.
The solution
The SunnyExtract pipeline
This case is not anonymised because it cannot be: the product is ours, we run it ourselves, and we hold it to the same rules as every other case on this site. Each freelancer gets an email address that is theirs alone and sets a single forwarding rule, once — the last thing they ever do by hand. From then on there is no app to open and nothing to upload: every invoice arrives already processed. The engine learns which documents each supplier sends every month — electricity, water, phone — and at month-end it goes looking for the one that did not come: it walks the bank movements until it finds the charge with no document to back it, then writes to the freelancer itself — not a generic reminder, but the name of the invoice to request and the bank charge that betrays it, with no person involved in the chase. That sweep runs from day one, at every month-end; what it does not have on day one is memory: it needs about two months of rhythm with each supplier before it can say what is missing. The VAT books reach the accountant prepared; the accountant validates each entry and exports it. The accounting judgement is not automated — the paperwork around it is removed. The boundary with SunnyExtract is public: above roughly 500 documents a month, or when the flow has to cross several systems, the operation belongs there — a step that starts with a conversation with our team, because no automatic bridge exists between the two products.
{
"event": "recurrence_check",
"account": "taz_01K2M...",
"expected_document": {
"vendor": "Telefónica de España, S.A.U.",
"kind": "telecom_invoice",
"cycle": "monthly",
"last_received": "2026-06-14"
},
"bank_evidence": {
"movement_ref": "mv_20260715_0083",
"amount_charged": -38.72,
"value_date": "2026-07-15"
},
"finding": "charge_without_invoice",
"chase": {
"channel": "email",
"to": "account_owner",
"document_named": "telecom_invoice_2026-07",
"human_in_the_chase": false,
"dispatched_at": "2026-07-31T08:05:00Z"
}
}
Outcomes
Operational impact
The last thing done by hand is a forwarding rule
One address of their own per freelancer, one rule left in place. From then on, an invoice's route to the VAT books no longer runs through anyone's Sunday.
'I forgot to request the invoice' stops being a memory problem
At month-end the engine compares what each supplier usually sends with what actually came in, checks it against the bank, and writes to the freelancer naming the missing bill. An expense without an invoice gets a name instead of slipping past.
The accountant receives prepared books, not folders
The VAT books arrive as drafts: the accountant validates the entries and exports. The sign-off stays human; what disappears is the digging that came before it.