Counsel: Honest AI CFO

Counsel is an AI C-suite for small businesses: the financial analysis of a CFO, the operational watchfulness of a COO, and the strategic prompting of a CEO, running on your real data instead of your gut. Connect the tools your business already runs on and Counsel reads the whole picture in one place. Seven paths in: Square, Stripe, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks, your bank through Plaid, or simply drop in a CSV, PDF statement, or receipt photo. Connections are one-tap sign-ins with read-only access, so Counsel can see your numbers but can never move your money. Once connected, data syncs automatically in the background. WHAT YOU GET A morning read that tells you what actually matters today: what you can pay yourself this week and why that number holds, which invoice to chase first, which subscription is a duplicate, and which day of the week is too thin to schedule anything expensive. A watchlist that speaks only when a rule fires, like margin slipping under your floor or cash runway crossing four months. A Simulations Lab where you rehearse decisions before making them: a hire, a price change, closing your slowest day, stacked together and tested against your own history with Monte Carlo simulation rather than an industry average. And a weekly shortlist of the three moves worth your limited time, ranked by measured impact. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT Every number carries a receipt. Tap any figure and it names its method, its sample size, and its confidence in plain English. And when the evidence is thin, Counsel refuses to call it: if a price change's measured effect is not statistically conclusive, the card says exactly that instead of projecting a gain it cannot defend. No other tool in this category treats overclaiming as a bug. Here that rule is enforced in code. Under the hood, Counsel runs on Aurora, an open-source verification engine that measures its own false-positive rates against synthetic ground truth and downgrades any finding that exceeds a disclosed error ceiling. The same methods used in genomics labs and market-regime analysis, translated for someone who has never heard the word changepoint. Privacy is architectural, not a policy promise. The analysis engines run on your device. The server is a pass-through that stores nothing, and connector tokens are sealed with authenticated encryption. The optional cloud Ask feature sends derived figures only, behind a consent card that shows you the exact numbers before anything leaves your phone, and answers arrive with the same receipts as everything else. WHAT TO EXPECT Connect one source and the first honest read of your business appears in about two minutes. Four full demo businesses (a restaurant, a trades company, a working musician, and a ceramics studio) let you feel everything before connecting anything. The math is free for everyone, forever: every receipt, every method, every honest refusal. Counsel Pro ($14.99/month or $119.99/year) is Counsel acting on your numbers: paying you, watching while you sleep, and writing the Sunday packet. Live on iOS, with a full web version. Built by a solo founder who believes a number you cannot audit is worth less than no number at all.