AI2Fin vs Tofu — US$0 to start, US$23 a month for the owner’s toolkit, on your own machine if you like

For a one-person business, just AI2Fin: it takes your bank feed and receipts, categorises and GST-splits every transaction, and hands your accountant coded entries — pushed to Xero or QuickBooks Online with the receipt attached (beta), or as the accountant pack for the year. Tofu is a tool an accounting firm buys for itself, at US$79 a month and up, to extract data from the documents its clients send in. If your accountant already uses Tofu inside their practice, that is their subscription, not yours; what you send them from AI2Fin arrives already coded, so there is simply less for their extraction step to do. You would not buy both.

Coded transactions instead of raw documents. In Xero or QuickBooks Online they see the entries you chose to push — a Spend or Receive Money, or a Purchase or Deposit — with the account code applied and the receipt PDF attached to the line. Outside the ledger, you can hand them the accountant pack for a financial year: a typed XLSX workbook, a one-page PDF summary and a zip of receipts. If they are on AI2Fin’s Practice workspace and you accept their invitation, they can also read a bounded summary of your year — totals by category, deductible totals, unmatched receipts, connected ledgers — with every read logged for you to see, and you can revoke it at any time. They never get a login to your account, and nothing is pushed unless you push it.

Yes, in beta. AI2Fin’s direct connectors read your chart of accounts and the last twelve months of coding to propose rules, then push each transaction you choose as a coded Spend or Receive Money in Xero, or a Purchase or Deposit in QuickBooks Online, with the receipt attached. Tofu’s push is mature and firm-oriented; it is the centre of that product. For MYOB, AI2Fin produces a CSV the file can import.

No. Tofu works from documents — it can extract transactions from a bank-statement PDF, but it does not hold a bank connection. With AI2Fin you connect a feed yourself with a key you own — BankSync, SimpleFIN, Akahu, Up Bank, Monzo or Starling — or upload CSV or XLSX statements, point Fin at a Google Sheet, or use a watched folder on the desktop edition. Bank-feed transactions stay inside AI2Fin unless you choose to include them in a push.

Tofu reads 200+ languages including handwriting, which matters for a firm receiving documents from every client. AI2Fin reads receipts in 100+ languages and keeps the merchant name in its original script with a translation beside it, so the record still matches what is printed on the receipt — useful when you travel or buy from overseas suppliers and want to find that transaction again.

Tofu is sold to accounting and bookkeeping firms, with pricing per firm and unlimited client entities. If you are not running a practice, AI2Fin is built for you directly, starts free, and the transactions you keep in it can be exported or pushed to the ledger your accountant already uses.

They help different people at tax time. Tofu speeds up the firm’s data entry so the ledger is complete. AI2Fin keeps GST separated per transaction, tracks travel and vehicle deductions, and produces BAS-ready exports for Australia and equivalent exports for 84 countries’ tax settings, so what reaches your accountant is already organised. AI2Fin helps you find and organise potential deductions; always confirm eligibility with your accountant or tax authority.