Built by a UK accountant, for UK practices.
Distil is made by Haisem Ltd, registered in England and Wales.
Why it exists.
Distil started in 2024, built by Gus, a UK accountant who had spent years posting client invoices and receipts by hand. The work was not difficult. It was just endless, and it arrived again every month.
The tools that were meant to help asked clients to download an app and make an account, which most never did. Some charged extra for bank statements. The generic ones did not know a UK VAT code from a nominal code, so the output still needed checking line by line.
So Distil was built for the way a UK practice actually works. A client gets a link, not an app. Documents are read, categorised against a real chart of accounts, reconciled against the bank, and sealed. The VAT return prefills from those sealed books, ready to check and submit. What it charges does not change when the practice wins a client.
What it is built around.
- Built by someone who did the job
- Every default in Distil is the one an accountant would have picked, because the person who set them had been doing the posting by hand the month before.
- UK first, and specific about it
- UK VAT treatments, nominal codes, supplier patterns, CIS, the nine boxes and the six-year retention convention. Not a general document reader with a British flag on it.
- Nothing for the client to install
- A practice sends a link. The client uploads from a phone, with no account, no app and no seat to pay for.
- One price for the practice
- No per-client fee at any tier and no minimum licence count. The automation is what makes that price shape possible.
What it runs on.
Documents are held in the UK. The application database sits in the EU under the UK’s adequacy decision for the EEA, so the data stays inside that perimeter. The full sub-processor list and the Article 46 safeguards are in the data processing agreement and the privacy policy, which are the maintained copy.
Where documents live
- Uploaded over TLS 1.2+, stored AES-256 encrypted in AWS London (eu-west-2)
- Moved to Glacier Instant Retrieval after 90 days, still openable from an evidence pack
- Every document is stored in UK data centres, encrypted at rest, and kept for six years.
Where the application runs
- Next.js and React on Vercel
- Supabase for authentication and the application database, hosted in the EU (Paris, eu-west-3)
- Row-level security scopes every query to one practice
What reads a document
- AWS Textract for optical character recognition
- OpenAI models for structured extraction and categorisation
- Corrections train supplier rules per client and per practice, never a shared model
Billing and monitoring
- Stripe for subscriptions. Card details never reach Distil
- No VAT is added at checkout. Haisem Ltd is not VAT registered
- Sentry for error monitoring
Questions about any of this?
Ask about features, onboarding, or how a particular client’s books would work in Distil. A UK accountant answers.