There’s a version of small-business software where invoicing and accounting are separate products that you reconcile against each other once a month, usually badly.
This isn’t that. Every invoice, payment, refund and stock movement writes its own double-entry journal as it happens, so your accounts aren’t something you produce at the end of a period. They’re already there.
What you can do
- Work from a standard chart of accounts for your country, or build your own.
- Have journals posted automatically from invoices, purchases, payments and stock movements.
- Import your bank statement - including the file your bank offers “for QuickBooks” or “for Quicken” - and match transactions against outstanding invoices and bills.
- Book a bank line with no invoice behind it - fuel, software, bank fees - straight to an account, and have that account suggested the next time the same payee turns up.
- Look up any posting in the books, whoever or whatever made it, and filter it down.
- Post manual journals for the things software can’t know about: accruals, corrections, opening balances.
- Reverse a posted entry rather than editing it, so the audit trail stays intact.
- Produce the tax return figures for your regime, and see how each box was arrived at.
- Start with your state’s sales tax rate already set, and add the other states you sell into.
- Keep a loan in the books, with each installment split into interest and repayment for you.
- Read the standard reports: trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet, aged receivables.
How it works in practice
Pick your chart of accounts once (Settings → Ledger Accounts). Start from the general default, which suits most businesses, or from one of the national schemes if you keep books to one - SKR03, SKR04 and SKR07 for Germany, RGS for the Netherlands, and French GAAP are included. Either way you begin with something structured rather than a blank chart. Add or rename accounts to suit how you actually work.
Then mostly forget about it. Raising an invoice posts revenue, receivables and tax. Registering a payment clears the receivable and moves the money to the bank account. Buying stock posts the asset, selling it posts the cost. You didn’t open the accounting screen for any of that.
Import the bank and reconcile (Finance → Bank). Upload a statement - the structured formats your bank exports, or a spreadsheet you map once - and each line is offered against the open invoices it might settle. Confirm a match and the payment is registered, the invoice marked paid, and the journal written. Lines that clearly match one open invoice can be booked all at once.
A US bank’s download works as it comes. Every US bank offers a statement “for Quicken” or “for QuickBooks” - a .qfx, .qbo or .ofx file - and that’s the one to take, for a checking account or a credit card. Import it as the bank gave it. Check numbers come through at the front of the line’s description, so “Check 1001” is there when you go looking for it. Overlapping downloads are fine: each transaction carries the bank’s own ID, so pulling the last ninety days again adds only what’s new, and two identical coffees on the same day stay two lines.
Plenty of bank lines have no invoice behind them. The fuel card, the software subscription, the bank’s own fee. Book one straight to an expense or income account from the statement line, or tick a batch and book them together; the dialog shows what it’s about to post before it does. The account is remembered per payee, so next month’s charge from the same vendor arrives with it already suggested, and the reason next to it. If there should have been a document - a customer paid and nobody raised the invoice, or a bill was never entered - raise it from the line instead: it opens already filled in from the bank’s amount and description, and finalizing it settles the line. A line that’s part one thing and part another opens a journal with the bank side already written, for you to split.
Post manual journals when you need to (Finance → Journal Entries). Drafts can be edited and checked. Once posted, an entry is permanent, and undoing one means reversing it, which leaves both the original and the reversal visible. That’s on purpose: books you can quietly edit are books nobody can rely on.
Look up any entry in the books. The register lists every posting across every journal: the ones you made by hand, and the many more the system made for itself when you raised an invoice, registered a payment or moved stock. Narrow it by journal, by date, by ledger account, by what the entry came from, or search it. It’s read-only, and corrections here work the way they do everywhere else in the books: a reversing entry, not an edit.
Your sales tax starts where your state does. A US company’s tax codes are created at its own state’s base rate, named after the state, so there’s nothing to look up on day one. Selling into another state you have nexus in is a button on the tax code list: pick the state and you get its sales and purchase pair at that state’s rate. A sales tax liability report shows taxable sales, exempt sales and tax collected per state for the quarter, taken from the same figures your books post from.
Track a loan instead of doing the split by hand (Finance → Loans). Enter what you borrowed, the rate, the term and the first payment date, pick the accounts, and activate. The schedule is worked out for you, and each installment posts itself on its date: interest to cost, the rest off what you owe. Equal installments the way a bank quotes them, or the same principal each month if that’s your arrangement.
Prepare the tax return (Finance → Tax). The figures come from the same journals, so a return and the accounts it summarizes can’t disagree. Open any box to see the transactions behind it, which is the part that matters when somebody questions a number.
Good to know
- Posted entries are never edited or deleted, only reversed. People new to double-entry sometimes read that as the software being inflexible. It’s the opposite - it’s what makes the numbers trustworthy, and every accounting system worth using behaves this way.
- Bank import quality depends on your bank’s export. The proper bank formats match far better than a file where the description is whatever the bank happened to print, and matching is only ever as good as the reference your customer typed.
- One bank file is one account. A download holding two accounts is turned away rather than merged, so download each account on its own. Investment statements don’t import.
- A wrong chart of accounts is painful to change later. Ten minutes with your accountant before you start beats a conversation after your first quarter.
- Your state’s base rate is the floor, not the whole answer. City and district taxes can add to it, and what your business owes where is between you and your accountant. What we can know exactly is the state rate, so that’s what you start with, and it’s yours to change.
- A rate change is a date, not an edit. When a rate moves you schedule the change from the day it applies, and documents before that day keep the rate they were taxed at. Rewriting the old rate in place would restate returns you’ve already filed.
- A loan’s terms can only be changed while it’s a draft. Once an installment is in the ledger, its journal quotes figures a new schedule wouldn’t agree with, so a late correction means reversing those entries first. The three accounts have to be set before anything posts.
- Automatic posting needs accounts set on your products and tax codes. The defaults cover most cases. Anything unusual should be checked before your first month-end.