FAQ — Stillpost

Question 1

How does the autonomous agent actually run?

Accepted Answer

Once Stillpost is wired up — bank, inbox and point-of-sale — it runs the bookkeeping loop unattended. There is no daily dashboard to babysit: it pulls the cash position every fifteen minutes, watches the past-due ledger, batches the day’s receipts into a reconciliation file, pegs the multi-state sales-tax liability to its calendar, and posts the period close when the period ends. The per-state cadence the liability pegs to is on the remittance calendar.

The loop has six steps: a cash-flow pull at 06:00, a past-due nudge at 09:00, a nightly receipts reconcile at 20:00, a fifty-state sales-tax estimate at 23:55, a margin guardrail at 06:45, and an end-of-period close when the month closes. Operators see a digest in their inbox; they don’t see the loop itself unless they want to — the editorial on our story page walks the cadence and the rationale behind picking cron times over a daily UI.

Question 2

How is my data secured?

Accepted Answer

Bank, email and point-of-sale connections are read-only — Stillpost reads the feed, never writes back to the source-of-truth system, and the credentials never leave the vault that handles the OAuth tokens. Operators can revoke a connection from the dashboard at any moment and the loop stops using it. The data flow — what gets pulled from each source, how it lands in the per-state sales-tax estimator — is walked end-to-end on  the small-businesses pillar . The vault itself sits behind the same isolation boundary the rest of the app’s tokens live in; nothing about a customer’s books is touched by anyone other than the autonomous loop that operates on the operator’s behalf. There is no shared password, no admin backdoor, and no analyst reading your books without your session. The deeper security questionnaire — SOC 2 controls, the data-flow read — is one  contact-form  note away from the team.

Question 3

What gets automated end-to-end each week?

Accepted Answer

The four staples: overdue invoice chasers (a polite nudge the day a bill ages past its term — the same email the operator would have sent, only it goes out at 09:00 instead of at the end of the week), nightly receipt reconciliation (mail and POS line items matched against a costing ledger before midnight), sales-tax accruals (fifty-state obligation pegged to the operator’s calendar, with the next remittance date flagged), and the weekly margin digest (revenue, COGS, net margin and a week-over-week delta shipped to the operator’s inbox before the morning brief). The point isn’t to replace the bookkeeper — it’s to remove the seven recurring jobs that take up the bookkeeper’s weekdays so the humans who care about the business can spend their time on the parts that actually move it. The tier mapping — Starter carries the chaser + receipts reconcile + margin digest, Pro layers the sales-tax accrual + weekly guardrails, Managed adds the period close — is on  the pricing grid , and the seven recurring jobs those tiers run are walked end-to-end on  the how-it-works page  and on  the small-businesses pillar .

Question 4

How does the three-tier pricing work — and what’s the 10% cut?

Accepted Answer

Three flat tiers, all priced like software with no surprise implementation fee: Starter (under $81 / month) wires the bank and inbox and runs the cash-flow feed, overdue chaser and nightly receipts reconcile; Pro ($243 / month) adds the multi-state sales-tax estimator, the period close that posts itself and weekly margin guardrails — the tier most operators stop at; Managed ($1,620+ / month) layers fractional-CFO working hours, audit-ready books and a quarterly strategy review on top of Pro. The 10% cut: every tier ships with a 10% discount already baked into the public price — the rate the operator would otherwise pay to a fractional bookkeeper handling the same weekly loop. That is why the headline price stays under $100 on Starter even though the bookkeeping hours it replaces don’t; the chronological week the loop runs is walked end-to-end on  the small-businesses pillar . Cancel any month; reply within one business day if you wire it up, and  the pricing grid  is where the side-by-side comparison lives.

Question 5

How does Stillpost connect to my bank?

Accepted Answer

Stillpost reads the bank, inbox and point-of-sale over read-only OAuth — Plaid for the long tail of institutions, native connectors for Mercury, Stripe, Square, and Brex. The credentials land in the same isolation boundary the rest of the app’s tokens sit behind; the loop pulls a transaction list without a write-back path, and the source-of-truth system stays exactly the way it was before Stillpost touched it. Wire-up runs one business day: the dashboard prompts for the bank, the inbox, the point-of-sale, and the loop’s first 06:00 cash-flow pull reads the feed by the next morning. Multi-account setups — operating + payroll + reserve, or main + a card-issuer sub-account — read in parallel and reconcile against the main operating account the operator picks during wire-up. Unsupported banks surface as a wire-up blocker rather than a half-built loop; the rest of the bookkeeping keeps running, and  the contact page  routes the blocker note to the team within one business day. The data-flow read end-to-end is walked on  the small-businesses pillar ; the cost frame is on  the pricing grid .

Question 6

What happens when my business operates in multiple states?

Accepted Answer

Pro pegs the multi-state sales-tax liability to the calendar the operator actually lives on — per-state nexus threshold monitoring (so the loop surfaces a state the operator is about to cross into rather than waiting until the filing window closes), the per-state accrual posted each night at 23:55, and the per-state remittance calendar that flags the next due date in the weekly margin digest. The estimator pulls from Avalara and TaxJar alongside the per-state DOR (Department of Revenue) feeds; the operator picks the upstream, and the loop reads from the same source on every pull so the published rate and the loop’s posted accrual can’t drift apart. When a second state becomes a real obligation — a remote employee in a new nexus, a marketplace that pushes a fulfillment center into state two — the loop adds the state to the peg, picks up the cadence for that state (most default to monthly, a smaller set quarterly, a handful — Alaska, Delaware, and a few others — annual), and the next digest lands with the new due date flagged. The California-specific cadence is on  the California pillar  because California doesn’t follow the 20th-of-the-month most states default to; the Texas market pegs to  the Texas monthly-on-the-20th filing cadence  for the Comptroller of Public Accounts cycle and the $1,500 quarterly-liability reclassification; the New York obligation flips on  the New York economic-nexus threshold  — the DTF’s $500K + 100-transaction two-prong; Florida adds  the Florida surtax stacking  on top of the 6% state base as a 0.5%–2% county levy; and Pennsylvania layers  the Pennsylvania Allegheny Philadelphia overlay  — a flat 6% base plus the Allegheny 0.5% and the Philadelphia 2% add-ons. The broader per-state hub lives on  the remittance calendar  so an operator with several obligations at once can pivot off one source. The tier that turns the estimator into a filer — Pro estimates and accrues, Managed files — is on  the pricing grid .

Question 7

Does Stillpost actually file my state taxes for me?

Accepted Answer

Managed files. Pro estimates and accrues — the operator files. Starter ships without the sales-tax layer at all. The tier mapping is the only place that distinction is enforced; the estimator is identical on Pro and Managed, the multi-state peg reads the same on both, but the act of pushing the return through the per-state DOR portal is a Managed-only step because the step carries a coordination cost the loop can’t make good on without a human reviewer for the edge cases (voluntary disclosures, nexus letters, marketplace-facilitator reclassification). A first-time Illinois filer, for instance, hits a state-specific registration sequence the loop can’t preempt: the Illinois business account number, the MyTaxIllinois portal, the ST-1 cadence on the LAST day of the month following the period.  The Illinois pillar  walks the cadence and the registration sequence; a Managed operator wires up the loop, the loop files the return, and the operator reviews the dashboard digest before the next filing window. Reprocessing a filed return — a corrected ST-1, for instance — is a Managed path, not a Pro path; Pro surfaces the error in the next digest and pauses the cadence on the affected state until a reviewer steps in. The tier that turns the estimator into a filer is on  the pricing grid .

Question 8

Does this replace my bookkeeper — or just the bookkeeping chores?

Accepted Answer

No. Stillpost takes the seven recurring jobs that take up a bookkeeper’s weekdays — the overdue chaser, the nightly receipts reconcile, the multi-state sales-tax accrual, the weekly margin digest, the period close, the cash-flow feed, the past-due ledger — and runs them unattended. The bookkeeper (or the fractional bookkeeper, or the cloud-bookkeeper who logs in twice a week) stays on payroll; they spend their time on the parts of the books that actually need a human reviewer (the corporate restructuring, the audit response, the one-time reconciliation against a prior period, the conversation with the operator about which direction the next quarter should bend). The expansion was deliberately tasteful about this.  Our story page  is the editorial hall where the rationale lives, and the tier mapping that does the heavy lifting — Starter carries the chaser + receipts reconcile under $81 / month, Pro layers the multi-state sales-tax accrual at $243 / month, Managed adds a human reviewer at $1,620+ / month — is on  the pricing grid . The bookkeeping loop the tier replaces is walked end-to-end on  the small-businesses pillar . There is no salesperson trying to retire the bookkeeper — the dividing line is the same dashboard view, week after week.

Question 9

How does the cost compare to hiring a bookkeeper?

Accepted Answer

Starter under $81 / month, Pro $243 / month, Managed $1,620+ / month — all three priced against the rate an operator would otherwise pay a fractional bookkeeper handling the same weekly loop, baked as a 10% discount into the public headline. The contrast frame: a fractional bookkeeper at $80 / hour, billed two-to-three hours every week to send the same polite chaser the loop sends at 09:00, runs the same receipts reconcile the loop runs at 20:00, and posts the same period close the loop posts when the month ends — the operator is paying for the hours, not the bookkeeping. The cost framing is a quiet argument and it sits on  our story page , the editorial hall where the math, the choice of cron times, and the rationale for the seven recurring jobs all sit next to each other. The bookkeeping loop the dollars replace — the chronological week — is walked end-to-end on  the small-businesses pillar . The tier grid — three flat tiers, Monthly / Annual cadence, the upgrade is the operator clicking the higher card — is on  the pricing grid . There is no salesperson upselling anything between tiers.

Question 10

How long does it take to set up?

Accepted Answer

One business day for the bookkeeping loop to be running. The wire-up phase connects the bank, the inbox, the point-of-sale at the onboarding call; the first 06:00 cash-flow pull runs by the next morning and the first weekly margin digest lands by Sunday night — before the Monday brief, with the week-over-week delta already computed. Multi-state sales-tax onboarding adds a calendar week; the per-state peg walks the operator through which states they owe and which the loop estimates, because the per-state registration sequence and the per-state cadence can’t be skipped. Audit-ready books and state filings on Managed add another two weeks for the books-history reconciliation against the prior period; the quarterly strategy review lands in the first ninety days, sync’d to the books-history reconciliation rather than the wire-up date. The per-state cadence the onboarding walks is on  the remittance calendar . If the loop hits a wire-up blocker — an unsupported bank, a missing inbox source, a tax feed not yet mapped to the operator’s footprint — the affected step stays offline until a fix lands and the rest of the bookkeeping keeps running. A note on  the contact page  routes the blocker to the team within one business day.

Question 11

What happens if a connection drops mid-loop — not just at wire-up?

Accepted Answer

The loop treats a dropped feed differently from a wire-up blocker. When a scheduled pull fails — bank OAuth token expires, the inbox webhook stops handing off receipts, the POS feed stalls mid-receipt — the previous reading stays held in the snapshot the loop was already operating on; the loop doesn’t rewind, doesn’t fabricate a zero, and doesn’t silently backfill from a stale cache. The next digest lands with the affected source flagged by name, the timestamp of the last successful read, and the cadence the loop will retry on (15-min for cash-flow, 09:00 for chasers, 20:00 for receipts, 23:55 for sales-tax). The audit trail — what read came through, when, from which source — keeps the operator’s books reconcilable rather than guessed. When the feed recovers, the loop resumes on its next scheduled tick and reads forward; no double-pull, no silent reconciliation against a supposed-but-not-real number, and the digest the next morning tells the operator exactly which gap occurred and which source it was on. A sustained outage — a token revoked on the operator’s side, a feed the upstream connector retired — reads the same way and routes through the same inbox:  the security page  covers the one-click revoke path the related entry walks (with the revoke-fidelity scope), and  the contact page  routes a sustained outage to the team within one business day.