For UK accountancy practices
Management accounts, with the story told.
Upload a client's trial balance. Narrative returns the full branded pack: deterministic statements and KPIs, 8 statutory compliance checks, 12-month projections and Athena's written commentary, which you approve line by line before a client sees a word.
Pack preview · March
Athena · draft commentary
Margin gave up two points to the new contract's onboarding costs; cash held firm and recovers it by June on current run rate.
The compliance radar
8 statutory checks your reporting tool has never heard of
A management pack tells the client how the business did. Narrative also checks whether anything in it is about to become a statutory problem, which makes it a different product from a pretty PDF.
An overdrawn loan account still outstanding at year end triggers a tax charge most clients have never heard of. Narrative flags it while there is still time to repay, not when the CT600 is due.
Rolling turnover tracked against the registration threshold, so the client hears about it from you, in the pack, rather than from HMRC afterwards.
A dividend paid without distributable reserves is unlawful, however good the month felt. Narrative checks the reserves before the pack congratulates anyone.
Filing dates pulled straight from the register and watched, so the accounts deadline surfaces in the management pack months before it can bite.
And four more, run on every pack, every period. Spotlight Reporting runs none of them.
The house rule
The AI never computes a number
Not as a slogan. As an enforced boundary between the part of the product that must be exact and the part that must be readable.
Every figure in the pack comes from a deterministic engine that works in whole pence and is tested against a golden suite. Same trial balance in, same pack out, every single time.
The commentary reads the engine's output and explains it: what moved, why it matters, what to raise in the meeting. She interprets figures. She is never allowed to produce one.
If Athena's draft quotes any figure the engine did not hand her, the guard rejects the draft before you see it. Then you approve the words, line by line. Numbers by machine, words by machine, judgement by you.
The forward view
12 months ahead, computed like the history
Projections from the same deterministic engine that built the statements, so the forward pages carry the same authority as the actuals. Not a chatbot's guess about next year.
The projected charge across the next 12 months with marginal relief applied properly, so the client's tax pot is sized for the bill that will actually arrive.
If the director's loan stays outstanding, here is what it costs and when. The flag on the radar becomes a number with a deadline attached.
How much can legally leave the company, and how that headroom moves over the year ahead. The s830 check, pointed forwards.
What you get
The pack, the story and the paper trail
One CSV, a whole pack
Trial balance in, branded management accounts out: statements, KPIs, variance, projections and commentary in one document your client will actually read.
Commentary you approve, line by line
Athena writes what changed and why it matters. Nothing reaches the client until you have approved every sentence, and each one is a click to accept or rewrite.
Describe the report you want
A plain-English report builder. Ask for a departmental gross-margin view or a covenants page in ordinary words and Narrative builds it from the mapped numbers.
The what-changed view
A variance engine that ranks the movements that matter this period, so the meeting starts with the story rather than a hunt through the comparatives.
Exports worth attaching
A branded PDF pack for the client, a 12-tab Excel workbook for the people who like to check, and CSV for everything downstream.
Xero, QuickBooks, Companies House
Live integrations pull the books and the statutory record, so the pack and the compliance radar work from current facts, not last quarter's export.
Pricing
Priced per client band, not per ambition
Spotlight Reporting starts at around £295 a month and does not check whether the dividend was legal. Narrative starts at £49 +VAT and does. Starter £49 · Growth £99 · Scale £199 /mo +VAT (per client band). Monthly, cancel anytime.
Free trial. No card
Part of the suite
One standard of evidence, five tools
Narrative tells the client's story in the management accounts. Footnote answers the tax question the pack raises, Engage wins the client and gets the engagement letter signed, AccountFlow runs the practice around them, and Envelope decodes the brown envelope when HMRC writes back. Same evidence gate everywhere.
Questions
Asked before you ask
How does the upload work?
Export a trial balance CSV from whatever the bookkeeping lives in and drop it into Narrative. Connected Xero and QuickBooks clients skip the export entirely. The engine computes the statements, the checks run, Athena drafts the commentary, and the pack is ready for your review.
Can I put my own branding on the pack?
Yes. Your logo and your colours, on every page. The pack goes to the client under your practice name. Narrative stays in the back room where the software belongs.
What if the trial balance is messy?
You map accounts to the pack lines once, with Narrative suggesting the obvious ones, and it remembers your choices for the next period. An unmapped account is flagged, not silently dropped, so the pack never quietly loses a number.
What does it integrate with?
Xero, QuickBooks and Companies House are live now. Anything else gets in through the trial balance CSV, which is the one export every system on earth can produce.
How does the trial work?
Free, no card. Upload a real trial balance and take the finished pack with you. If it does not beat what your practice sends today, you have lost an afternoon at most.
Twenty seconds of it
Watch a trial balance become a pack
CSV in, engine computes, radar checks, commentary approved line by line. The whole product in one loop.
Send a pack with the story told
Free trial, no card. Upload one real trial balance and put the finished pack next to whatever your practice sends today. The comparison does the selling.