Most accounting software is sold on how much it does for you. The trouble with software that does things for you is that it sometimes does them wrongly and confidently: a bank line matched to the wrong invoice, an account mapped to the line next to the right one, a difference swept into rounding. Nothing on the screen says so, and the person who signs the accounts finds it in the review, or after the return has gone.
Murgese is built the other way round. Where a person should decide, it stops and says so on the screen. Here are twelve places it does that.
In the books
1. A bank statement with no year on it
Murgese reads a PDF bank statement on your own machine, following the running balance the bank prints, and imports it only when its checks against the bank's own figures agree. A statement that never prints its year is refused rather than guessed, because a guess is how a January 2025 statement ends up in a 2026 VAT quarter.
2. A bank line that looks like a match
Bank rules suggest the coding. They post on their own only if you switch that on.
3. A bill read from a PDF
The reader turns a PDF, a scan or a photographed receipt into a draft for you to check. It never picks the nominal account, and nothing posts until a person has looked at it.
4. Records sent by email
Clients send their paperwork to a mailbox the firm already has. What Murgese can match to a client with certainty is filed against that client; anything else waits for a person to place it. A receipt filed against the wrong client is worse than one that was never filed at all.
5. Bills or sales?
When a client's records are read, Murgese asks whether to read them as bills or as sales invoices. There are two buttons, because a guess would put a year of sales into purchases about half the time.
6. Time with no charge-out rate
Time recorded by somebody with no rate set is valued at nil and flagged, never valued at a guess.
7. An unmatched CIS verification
A verification number ending in a suffix letter means HMRC could not match the subcontractor, and the rate is 30%. Murgese applies it whatever the treatment box says: the form warns you, and the server enforces it.
In the group accounts
8. Mapping a subsidiary's accounts
Murgese Consolidate suggests where an account lands on the group chart only on an exact match: last period's decision, a sister company's, the code, then the name. There is no fuzzy matching. A sister company's decision is reused only when the code and the name both match, because in one real group the same code was an intercompany debtor in one company and something else entirely in another.
9. An intercompany difference
When two group companies' balances do not agree, it eliminates what cancels and leaves the rest on its line, with the amount and both companies named. A difference between two sets of books is a reconciling item to agree, not a rounding to plug.
10. Goodwill's useful life
FRS 102 caps goodwill's life at ten years where no reliable estimate can be made. A cap is not a default, so amortisation waits until somebody decides the life, then runs by the month from the date of acquisition.
11. Profit still sitting in group stock
Sales between group companies cancel out from the mapping. The profit inside stock the buyer has not yet sold on does not, because it is a stock count rather than a posting. Consolidate asks for it, selling company by selling company, under FRS 102 paragraph 9.15. Nil is an answer. A company nobody has asked about stops the accounts.
12. A company bought part way through the year
The seller's months are not the group's. Consolidate asks for a trial balance at the date control passed, rather than apportioning the year by days.
Why build it this way
A refusal is slower than a guess at the moment it happens. It is a great deal faster than finding the guess in the review, and cheaper than finding it after a return has been filed. The people who sign accounts check the software anyway. We would rather the software told them where to look.
See it on your own work
Both products are in a pilot for UK practices, businesses and group finance teams: free for the whole pilot, then a pilot tester's price held for two years. Apply for the pilot. Everything Murgese does not do yet is set out on the status page.