Peresoft has rolled out a set of changes designed to let Cashbook users resolve queries and manage routine admin themselves, at any hour, without waiting on a member of its staff. An AI help bot now sits inside the Cashbook, RecXpress and EFTXpress web UIs; a rebuilt company website carries a bank-format matching tool; and an expanded self-service portal lets customers generate their own invoices, quotes and licences around the clock.
The direction reflects a settled view at Peresoft about where technology belongs. Rather than rebuilding its products around artificial intelligence, the company has used AI and web tools to smooth the work that surrounds them, the support and admin tasks that sit between a user and getting on with the job.
Bobby Perel, Managing Director of Peresoft, puts it plainly: “For us, AI is about creating tools that improve how you actually use the product. It gives you what you already know, and then adds more options around it.”
Perel points to the maturity of the products as the reason for that focus. After more than four decades of development, Cashbook and its companion modules are complete, well-proven tools, and the work now is refinement rather than filling gaps. Because of that, AI is not needed to build out the software itself. “Our products are mature and proven. We are not looking to AI to finish them, we continue to refine them ourselves,” he says. “That frees us to use AI where it makes a real difference for the customer, which is the support and the experience around the product.”
Perel has long held that dependable, proven software has to come first, and that new tools earn their place by making that software easier to work with rather than by adding complexity. Each of the changes removes a step that used to slow users down or leave them waiting.
In-product help drawn from two decades of forum knowledge
The centrepiece is a help bot that now answers user queries directly inside the Cashbook, RecXpress and EFTXpress web UIs, at any hour and without human intervention. Because it is built into the products themselves, every user has access to it as they work, rather than having to break off and search elsewhere.
Resolving a technical query has often meant waiting for business hours, searching years of forum posts by hand or contacting the Peresoft team directly. For users working across time zones or handling an urgent task, that delay carries a real cost.
The help bot uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an approach that retrieves answers from a defined, maintained knowledge base rather than generating them from general web content. That distinction matters for technical support: answers are grounded in verified Peresoft material rather than open internet sources that may be outdated or unrelated. When a user asks a question, the system matches it against the knowledge base and an AI language model composes a clear response with references to the source, so the user can verify it or read further. If the first answer falls short, the system widens its search across up to five attempts before escalating to human support. It handles spelling errors and rephrased questions without difficulty.
The same assistant has been built into the Peresoft support forums, where a posted thread receives an instant suggested answer from the Peresoft Help Assistant rather than waiting on a reply. Combined with the in-product help, it means a user gets a first response immediately, whether they are working inside the web UIs or posting a question to the forum.
The knowledge base behind it is the product of a decision made more than 20 years ago. Peresoft has run a structured forum since 2003, and the discipline of keeping support on the forum rather than in e-mail has built a large, searchable archive of verified knowledge. “We’ve now got a huge resource available to us that wouldn’t have been there if it was just e-mails,” Perel says.
Wayne Roach, Senior Analyst at Peresoft, who developed the bot, noted that building a comparable system from scratch would have taken several months. With AI assistance, it was completed in under a day.
Matching bank formats on the new website
Launched alongside a completely rebuilt company website, the Format Finder tackles a long-standing point of friction: identifying the correct bank format for EFT or reconciliation processing. Peresoft maintains a library of over 440 EFTXpress and RecXpress formats covering banks across several countries, and working out whether a given format is already supported has traditionally meant sending files to the development team and waiting for a reply.
The Format Finder, developed by Natalie Rose Jezile, Marketing Manager at Peresoft, lets a user drag and drop a sample bank file and run it against the full library instantly. Where a match exists, it is returned at once. Where it does not, the tool presents a structured submission form that captures everything Peresoft needs to build a new format, including sample files, spec documents, and licence details, and sends it straight to the development team. Users can also browse the full library by product type and country. Many of these formats are not publicly available and cannot be found through a web search.
Self-service around the clock
The rebuilt website also expands what customers can do without involving Peresoft staff at all. Invoices, quotes and even licences can now be generated directly through the site, at any time of day. Tasks that once depended on reaching someone during office hours can now be completed by the user at the moment they need them.
Less waiting, more self-sufficiency
Taken together, the changes point in one direction: giving users the means to answer their own questions, find what they need and handle their own admin, without depending on Peresoft staff or office hours. For a customer base spread across Africa and beyond, being able to get answers and settle admin at any hour has direct, practical value.
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