Luca for UK accountants — stop doing shoebox bookkeeping
Your clients don't pay you for bank rec. They pay you for advice, planning and statutory filings. Luca handles the bookkeeping for them so you can focus on the work you trained for.
The accountancy practice problem
Most UK accountancy practices are stuck doing two jobs: bookkeeping (low-value, time-intensive, charged out at £30-£50/hr) and advisory + statutory work (high-value, charged at £100-£200/hr). The bookkeeping is the bottleneck — it consumes junior staff time, drives client price sensitivity, and gets cheaper every year as software improves.
Luca lets you stop doing the bookkeeping. Your client runs Luca; Luca does the daily work; you supervise, advise and file.
How a Luca-based practice works
1. You recommend Luca to your client
Either the £20/month hosted plan, or you/the client self-host free. Either way, Luca is set up against the client's bank accounts and channels.
2. Luca does the bookkeeping
Bank feeds reconciled daily. Transactions categorised. Receipts captured. VAT prepared. Year-round accruals, depreciation, prepayments handled.
3. You get audit-grade access
You're invited to the client's Luca instance with read access to ledgers, P&L, balance sheet, VAT returns, and the cryptographic Merkle-chain audit trail. The Merkle chain proves no historical entries have been changed — useful for HMRC enquiries.
4. You add the value
Monthly review: spot-check the categorisations, advise on tax-efficient choices, plan for year-end. Quarterly: VAT review and submission. Annual: statutory accounts prep and filing, CT600.
What this lets practices do
- Take more clients per qualified accountant. If you're not doing bookkeeping, your capacity goes up 3-5x.
- Charge for advisory, not data entry. Move clients from "bookkeeping + accounts" packages to "supervision + advice + filing" packages.
- Compete on advice, not price. Bookkeeping is being commoditised. Advice isn't.
- Audit-grade ledger. HMRC enquiries become routine instead of nervous.
- Differentiate. Most UK accountants will be late adopters of AI bookkeeping; early movers win the next 5 years of clients.
Multi-client setup
If you're running 10+ Luca client instances, we can set up a practice-portal view that lets you see across all of them. Contact us for the practice partner programme.
Open source
Luca is MIT-licensed. You can read the code, modify it, host it on your own infrastructure. Your client data lives on hardware you control. Self-installation guide.
Pricing for practices
- Per-client hosted: Standard £20/month per client — can be billed to client or absorbed into your service fee.
- Practice self-hosting: Run as many client instances as you want on your own server. Free software, you handle infrastructure cost.
- Practice partner programme: White-label, multi-client portal, training and support for your team. Contact us for terms.
Related
Want to be the AI-bookkeeping practice in your area?
Book 30 minutes. We'll talk through what offering AI-led bookkeeping looks like for your practice, your clients, and your fees.