Accounting is the last place a director would open up
Accounting is the last place a director would open up to an AI, and rightly so. An accounting system holds the bank details of its suppliers, the detail of what each of them invoiced, and sometimes lines that let someone work out a salary.
Yet it is the source that makes an AI useful on the questions that actually matter. Has this client been paying late for a long time. How much did that contractor cost us last year. Which supplier went from two invoices a year to one a month. None of those answers requires knowing a bank account number.
The invoice, named field by field
On a financial source, scope is described in fields rather than in categories. Here is the list, as it is written in the connector.
Line items are excluded for a precise reason: that is where a salary or a private expense can be read. An invoice's total is enough to answer management questions, and it says nothing about what is inside.
What is never named cannot leak
Pennylane's interface cannot return part of a record: it returns the whole invoice, bank details included. Many connectors then settle for filtering what they received, which assumes knowing in advance every field that must be hidden.
The Pennylane connector works the other way round. It names one by one the fields it writes, and it writes those only. A field it has not named cannot come out, including a field Pennylane might add tomorrow, because it will never be read.
The consequence comes down to one line, and it is visible in how the product behaves. An invoice of an unexpected shape produces a shorter note, never a wider one.
By default, your accounts are readable by nobody
Pennylane sets no read permission at the level of an invoice. The access key sees the entire ledger, and it is the same key for every invoice. There is therefore nothing to inherit, no original permission to lean on, unlike a shared file or a discussion channel.
The connector draws the most cautious conclusion available. Nothing is filed, so nothing is readable, until an administrator explicitly designates the department entitled to read the accounts. Three conditions have to hold: that department must be named, its name must be valid, and it must genuinely exist in your organisation.
If any one of the three is missing, your accounts stay on hold and nobody reads them. A finance department invented in a configuration file is not enough to open access, and that is the point.
One connection per company, and a full reread on every pass
The connector reads four lists for a single company: sales invoices, purchase invoices, clients and suppliers. A group holding three companies in Pennylane therefore sets up three connections, each with its own key and its own scope. None of the three sees the other two's accounts.
Pennylane's interface cannot say what has changed since last time, and its change log only reaches back a few weeks. Every pass therefore lists all four sets in full. An unchanged invoice costs nothing to review, and a new invoice shows up on the following pass rather than the minute it is entered.
One precaution deserves naming, because it protects your data rather than our convenience. When a page of results announces more to come without giving the means to reach it, the pass fails loudly instead of carrying on. Without that rule, a partial reconciliation would conclude that the unread invoices had disappeared, which is the quietest way to lose data.
What this connector does not do
It does no accounting. It computes no balance, reconciles no payment, produces no statement, and replaces neither your software nor your accountant. It gives an AI enough to answer management questions from your real invoices.
The name of an individual client is a person's name, and it is kept, because it is what makes an invoice intelligible. That is precisely why nothing is readable before a department has been designated.
An invoice's label is free text, so its content is whatever your team writes there. If a label holds something sensitive, it comes in with the invoice.
An invoice deleted in Pennylane is not erased from your Kastel. It is marked there as gone at the source and kept, until an administrator decides to erase it. On an accounting source, keeping is the cautious behaviour, and the disappearance is itself a piece of information.
Let us talk about your case before you connect anything.
A financial source is the kind of subject where a conversation beats a web page. Tell us what you want an AI to know about your accounts, and we will tell you plainly what Kastel does and does not do.
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