Basis

What Basis ships is not a ledger, and a buyer should know that before reading further. It is a layer of AI agents that connect to a client's existing general ledger and do the preparation work inside it: coding new bank and card activity against that client's own history and chart of accounts, drafting journal entries from a payroll report or bank statement, running reconciliations against attached statements and raising the unmatched detail as exceptions with proposed fixes. High-confidence transactions post automatically, low-confidence ones queue for a human. On the tax side it maps a trial balance to return lines against prior-year mapping, aggregates K-1s including footnotes and passive splits, drafts M-1 and fixed asset workpapers, and ties a draft return back to source before it goes out. The firm-side structure is real: work is organized by client, and firms write shareable Procedures that encode how they want a job done, on top of 350-plus prebuilt ones.

This suits a firm with volume and repetition. The economics only work when the same close or the same return shape recurs enough to be worth codifying, which in practice means a CAS department or a tax group rather than a solo preparer with fifty varied 1040s. Basis names a managing partner at Whitcomb & Sheridan and publishes a Small Firms page, so the low end is served, but the referenced deployments are UHY, Clark Nuber, Boulay, Wiss and BPB.

The friction is commercial rather than technical. There is no published price, no self-serve signup and no trial. Access runs through a waitlist form or a sales demo, and the waitlist form asks for your current ERP, which tells you the sales motion assumes a conversation. The site names no ledger, tax package or practice management system by name, so which of QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage Intacct, UltraTax or Drake is actually wired in cannot be established from the vendor's own material. A firm evaluating this has to get that list in a call. Nothing on the site addresses how a firm gets billed for a hundred client workspaces.

Digits and Campfire are the nearby names but not really the same purchase, because both replace the ledger and Basis works on whichever one is already there. That is the meaningful distinction when the reader is a firm with a client base spread across several accounting systems it does not control.

The tier moved up from one-to-watch on evidence the site actually carries. Basis publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications, enforced MFA, US-only hosting, no model training on customer data and full tenant isolation, and it puts named partners at top-50 firms behind specific claims about hours saved. That is a heavier track record than one-to-watch implies. It stops short of top-pick because a firm of two to fifty cannot see a price, cannot start a trial, and cannot confirm from public material that their ledger is supported.