How to use the business workspace
- Open the workspace with the button above and choose your country and business type: freelancer, services or shop. Or open the demo company to look around first.
- Enter opening balances for your bank, cash and anything customers already owe you or you owe suppliers. Skip this if you are starting from zero.
- Record your money in and money out. Simple mode uses plain labels (“Money in & out”, “Who owes me”, “What I owe”). Advanced mode shows the full journal with debit and credit columns.
- Issue invoices and enter bills. Each one posts to receivables or payables, and recording the payment clears it.
- Import your bank statement (CSV, OFX, QIF, camt.053 or MT940) and confirm the suggested matches to reconcile.
- Read your reports – trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet, VAT/GST summary and budget versus actual – and export them.
- Close the period when a month or year is finished: the checklist flags unreconciled lines and open items, then locks the period so it cannot change by accident.
How double-entry bookkeeping works here
Every transaction is recorded as at least two lines whose debits equal their credits. Selling a service for $500 on credit, for example, debits accounts receivable and credits sales; when the customer pays, cash is debited and receivables credited. The workspace refuses to post an entry that does not balance, which is the built-in check the IRS describes for double-entry systems in Publication 583. Amounts are stored as whole cents, so totals never drift by a rounding fraction.
Posted entries are never edited in place. A mistake is corrected with a reversing entry, and each posting is chained into an audit trail you can verify from Settings. Entry numbers are gapless per book.
Worked example: a freelancer’s first month
Maya, a freelance designer, opens a book with $3,000 in her business bank account.
| Date | What happened | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 May | Invoice #1 to a client, $1,200 | Accounts receivable 1,200 | Design income 1,200 |
| 9 May | Software subscription, $45 | Software 45 | Bank 45 |
| 20 May | Client pays invoice #1 | Bank 1,200 | Accounts receivable 1,200 |
| 28 May | Bank fee, $5 | Bank fees 5 | Bank 5 |
At the end of May the trial balance balances, profit and loss shows income of $1,200 and expenses of $50 (profit $1,150), and the bank account stands at $4,150 – the same figure as the bank statement once the four lines are matched in the reconciliation screen.
What the workspace includes
- Sales and purchases: invoices, quotes, bills, credit notes, contacts, ageing of receivables and payables, and file attachments (receipts are compressed and kept in the browser).
- Bank: statement import, matching suggestions, reconciliation, a cash book and petty cash.
- Inventory and assets: stock items valued at weighted average cost, and fixed assets with depreciation schedules.
- Payroll register: gross pay, deductions and employer costs entered by you; the workspace does not calculate taxes.
- Period close: checklist, period locks, foreign-exchange revaluation and year-end close to retained earnings.
- Exports and backups: every report to Excel, Word, PDF or CSV; an accountant ZIP pack; plain or encrypted JSON backups.
Tips for keeping clean books
- Reconcile monthly. Matching every bank line soon after the month ends catches missed and duplicated entries while you still remember them.
- Keep business and personal money apart. A separate bank account makes the books, and any tax questions, far simpler.
- Back up after each session. The books live in one browser; a backup file on another drive is your safety net.
- Keep the source documents. The IRS says to keep records “as long as needed to prove the income or deductions on a tax return”. Attach receipts to entries or store them alongside your backups.
- Use the same account each time for the same kind of cost, so the profit and loss statement stays comparable month to month.
Limitations
This is a bookkeeping and record-keeping tool, not tax, legal or accounting advice. It is not certified e-invoicing or filing software, it does not calculate payroll or income taxes, and multi-user access is not available because the data never leaves your device. Check local requirements with a qualified professional.