What is this website?
Latch is a desktop automation tool for accounting and financial close work. You demonstrate a repetitive task once on your machine the way you would train a new hire; it then builds a bounded sidekick that continues inside your existing tools under your rules, and hands uncertain steps back to a human. It is aimed not at “writing another prompt,” but at the many clicks, reconciliations, and filing details inside month-end close. It fits finance people who repeatedly move between Excel, ledgers, and bank portals.
Key Features
- Record desktop actions and spoken decisions to generate a reviewable sidekick
- Connect common finance and office tools (such as spreadsheets, ledgers, cloud drives, and bank portals)
- Run within the scope and connections you set; pause on uncertain steps for your judgment
- Keep step-by-step run logs for review and audit export (depending on plan)
- Offer a free Open plan and paid tiers that scale by seats/quotas
- Emphasize testing before writing back to files or data, to reduce accidental changes
Common Use Cases
- Accountants reconcile banks: download statements, align the books, draft a reconciliation, then ask you to confirm differences
- Finance imports expenses into workbooks at month-end and handles prepaid and installment items under your rules
- Controllers record a reconciliation or model-update flow once and let the sidekick repeat it monthly
- Teams move files across tools with naming rules without hand-building a checklist every time
- Export run history when you need a close trail of “what ran and which step a human decided”
Who is it for?
- Accountants and finance ops with many recurring close, reconciliation, and expense cutoff flows
- Finance leads who want automation but keep judgment authority
- Teams that can install a desktop client and connect existing tools on the local machine
- Less suitable for: people who only want to chat in a browser and cannot or will not install a desktop client
- Also less suitable for: users who want one-off free-form Q&A with no fixed close process
How does it compare to similar tools?
Compare:
- Learning method: demonstrate actions to generate a flow vs. hand-writing prompts/flowcharts
- Runtime location: desktop sandbox connected to local tools vs. pure cloud RPA
- Control granularity: step visibility, and whether connections and write-back permissions can be limited
- Billing: whether a long-term free quota tier exists, and whether usage is metered by run quota
- Industry fit: whether it centers on accounting month-end close, not generic desktop scripts
If your pain is “too many close steps and prompts that never capture them clearly,” a demonstration-style sidekick fits better; if you need developer workflows or marketing automation, look at other automation categories.
What Our Customers Say
- Accountant: after recording a reconciliation path once, later months drop many clicks—but exceptions still need a human nod.
- Finance manager: preview-before-write-back feels safer to hand to automation than “one-click change the books.”
- Small team: the Open free tier is good for trying one sidekick first; consider paid tiers after quota runs out.
- Limit: without a desktop environment, or when the process is highly unstable, recording cost may outweigh the benefit.
FAQ
Q: Is Latch free?
A: There is an Open free plan (single user and monthly quota); higher seats and quotas require payment—see the pricing page.
Q: Do I have to write prompts?
A: The product mainly promotes recording a desktop demonstration of the flow, not writing a perfect prompt first.
Q: Can I run every task fully in the browser?
A: The site says you open Latch on the desktop to record screen and microphone; task execution is primarily desktop-side.
Q: Is it suitable for non-accounting teams?
A: Positioning centers on accounting close and recurring finance flows; other industries with similar processes may evaluate it, but it is not a general chat tool.
