November 20, 2025 |

Making Money Moves

Since I started JSC 3 years ago, one tool has been at the dead center of my stack: Bonsai. Bonsai is an all-in-one business services platform for solopreneurs. It can do it all--invoices, contracts, proposals, task management, tax preparation. They even had a bank account.
I say “had” because as of next week, Bonsai is saying goodbye to their bank account, as it seems they’ve been acquired by Zoom. And it turns out, this acquisition represents a growth sector for fintech that has exploded in just the last year: Solopreneurs. Yes, us small-but-mighty independents have gotten the attention of the big money people. Most of the action is in embedded finance--adding bank accounts and other financial services to existing platforms--and neobanks--technology companies that, through banking partners, provide financial services and digital tech that traditional banks can’t compete with. Together, these tools create exciting efficiencies--if you know how to integrate them.

Today’s workflow deals with formatting. When working with platforms like Square, Relay and embedded financial tools, you can’t control how transactions are labeled, making them hard to incorporate into existing financial reports. Automated formatting to the rescue!

When I made the switch from Bonsai to Relay, I immediately broke my monthly reporting. That’s because Relay labels transactions differently than Bonsai, requiring some automation magic. If you are a solopreneur, creator or gig economy worker, a snag like this could take days or weeks to sort out. And as embedded finance grows, more and more companies may face this issue as well. You don’t need to be a CFO to fix this.

› Regardless of your new banking partner’s integration capabilities, you can keep reports functional.

› Automatically update transaction records in your CRM deal flow.

› Create an Email Parser by Zapier mailbox to receive your statements.

› Set up a recurring statement email to send statements to your new mailbox. Choose CSV statements.

› Trigger your workflow when the statement is received. Use a formatter step to parse the CSV then add a step to find the deal in CRM using Payee name. Pull in the Deal’s unique ID..

› Format your data as needed using formatting steps. Then create a formatting step to add your Deal Amount to the statement line item.

› Pass formatted data to the corresponding fields in your CRM and reports.

A change to a new kind of banking platform doesn’t have to be a chore. In its first week, this workflow saved me approximately 3 hours of busywork. Updating reporting weekly means you save 12 hours a month. This setup took me 30 minutes. You do the math.

Want to build something like this for your business? ➡️ We can help ➡️

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