Account Book

How it works

1. Answer a few questions once. The kind of business, its name, the month your year starts, whether you charge tax, and the cash and bank balance you start with. The book makes its list of accounts from the answers.
2. Enter what happens. The Home screen has five buttons: + Money in, + Money out, + Sale, + Purchase and Transfer. Each opens a short form — a date, an amount, who or what it was for.
3. Keep names where money is owed. Under People, add the customers who buy on credit and the suppliers you buy from on credit. Each has a running balance and a statement.
4. Read the reports. Cash book, bank book, ledger, day book, profit and loss, balance sheet, trial balance, who owes what, and a tax summary — for any dates, on screen, on paper, as a PDF or as a spreadsheet file.
5. Export a copy. Everything is kept in this browser on this device. Export everything writes one file that keeps it safe, and that another device can import to carry on.

There is no “save” for the book as a whole and no account to sign in to. Each entry is kept the moment you tap Save on it.

The six kinds of entry

A sale or a purchase can have up to 30 lines, each under its own heading and — when the book keeps tax — at its own rate. A sale on credit needs the customer's name and adds to what they owe; when they pay, that is a Money in from that customer.

What happens underneath: double entry

Every entry is written twice — once on the account that gives and once on the account that receives — and the two sides are always equal. Paying 6,000 of rent from the bank puts 6,000 on Rent and takes 6,000 from Bank account. A credit sale of 2,360 that includes 360 of tax puts 2,360 against the customer's name, 2,000 on Sales and 360 on Tax collected on sales.

You never have to type the two sides: the form works them out, and How this goes into the accounts at the foot of every entry shows them. Because the two sides are always equal, the balance sheet always balances and the trial balance always agrees. The book refuses to save an entry that would break this, and amounts are kept as whole paise so that columns add up to exactly what they show.

Switch on Accountant's view under Books to see debits, credits and the names an accountant uses — receipt, payment, contra, journal — throughout.

Setting up, step by step

On a device that has not used the book before, the setup opens by itself as soon as the page is touched. It asks five things, one screen at a time:

1. The kind of business. Each kind starts with its own list: a shop or trading business has 26 ready accounts, food and drink 26 ready accounts, services 24 ready accounts, a freelancer or professional 25 ready accounts, a workshop 26 ready accounts, and “Something else” 22 ready accounts.
2. The name, phone and address, for the top of reports. All three can be left empty.
3. Money and the year. One of ten currencies, and the month your year of account starts in — April for rupees, January otherwise, until you choose. A switch says whether you charge a tax such as GST or VAT.
4. What you start with. The day the book starts, and the cash in hand and the bank balance at the start of that day.
5. A summary to check, and Start the book.

Nothing is saved until that last button. Later leaves without changing anything. Books → Run the setup again asks the same questions again and only ever adds accounts: it never removes an account or an entry.

Accounts: the headings your money is counted under

An account is a heading: Cash in hand, Rent, Sales. Each is one of five sorts — what the business has, what it owes, the owner's stake, income, or an expense — and the sort decides which report it appears on. Under Books you can rename any account, add your own (a second bank account, a new kind of expense), and mark one “No longer used” so it stays in old reports but leaves the lists you choose from. A book holds up to 150 accounts.

A few accounts are written to by the app itself — cash, bank, customers, suppliers, the two tax accounts, capital, sales, purchases. Those can be renamed but not removed. An account that has entries cannot be removed either.

Opening balances

A business that is already running does not start from nothing. Books → Opening balances lists everything the business has and owes on the day the book starts: cash, bank, equipment, deposits, what each customer owed, loans, what was owed to each supplier. Type what you know. Whatever is left over — what the business has, less what it owes — is entered as the owner's capital, so the book balances from its first day. The opening can be changed later, until that part of the book is closed.

Customers and suppliers

The People part has two lists. Each name shows what they owe you, or what you owe them, worked out from the entries: a credit sale adds to a customer's balance and money received from them takes it off. Tap a name to see its lines, start an entry for it, print a statement, or open WhatsApp with the balance written out — you choose who it goes to and send it there; this page sends nothing. The book holds up to 1,500 customers and suppliers.

Tax on sales and purchases

With Keep track of tax switched on, every line of a sale or a purchase has a box for the rate, in percent. You type the rate — the book knows none — and say whether the amount is before the tax or already includes it. The tax is worked out to the paisa and kept in two accounts of its own: tax collected on sales, and tax paid on purchases. The Tax summary report adds both up by rate for any dates and shows the difference.

The summary is a working paper for you or your accountant. It is not a tax return, it does not split a tax into parts such as CGST, SGST and IGST, and it files nothing.

The reports

There are 9 reports, each for any stretch of days or as on any day:

• Profit and loss — income, expenses, and the profit or loss between two dates.
• Balance sheet — what the business has, what it owes, and the owner's stake on a day.
• Cash book and Bank book — every amount in and out of a till or a bank account, with the balance after each.
• Ledger — any one account, line by line.
• Day book — every entry in the order of its date.
• Trial balance — every account's balance in a debit or a credit column, with the two totals equal.
• Who owes what — customers who owe you and suppliers you owe.
• Tax summary — shown when the book keeps tax.

Tap a line of a report to open what it came from. Print or save as PDF opens the device's own print window, which can also save a PDF; Spreadsheet file saves a CSV that opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.

Checking the bank

Reports → Check against a bank statement lists the lines of a bank account. Tick each one you can see on the bank's statement. The sheet then shows your book's balance, the money in and out that the bank has not shown yet, and what the statement should therefore say. Type the statement's closing balance and it tells you whether the two agree, and by how much they differ if not.

Stock

The book does not track stock item by item. Goods count as a cost on the day they are bought. When you count what is unsold — at the end of a month or a year — enter its value under Books → Count the stock, and the profit is put right for it: unsold goods are taken out of the cost and shown on the balance sheet as stock in hand.

The end of the year

Nothing needs doing. Balances carry forward by themselves, each year's income and expenses start again from nothing, and the profit of earlier years appears on the balance sheet as a line of its own. When a year's figures are final, Books → Close the book up to a date stops entries on or before that date from being added, changed or cancelled. It can be opened again.

Using it with the Shop Billing Counter

A shop that bills on the Shop Billing Counter on the same device can bring its takings in under Books. Each day's bills become one sales entry — split into cash, UPI and credit by customer — and each expense typed at the counter becomes a payment. Bringing in again replaces what was brought in before, so a bill cancelled later at the counter is put right here and nothing is counted twice. Nothing is changed at the counter.

Moving to another device

Under Books → Move to another device, Export everything writes one file with the whole book in it: the business's details, the accounts, the customers and suppliers, and every entry. On a phone it opens the share sheet, so the file can go by WhatsApp, e-mail or a drive; on a computer it is saved to the downloads folder.

On the other device, open the Account Book and tap Import from a file — it is also on the first screen of the setup, and on a computer the file can simply be dropped on the page. Before anything changes, a sheet shows what is in the file beside what the device holds now: the business, the number of accounts and entries, the dates they cover. If the file is older than what is on the device, it says how many entries would be lost, and it offers to save a copy of the device's own book first.

Importing replaces the book on the device with the one in the file. It never joins two books: two devices that have both made entries since the file was written cannot be merged. Keep the book on one device at a time.

Export the accounts writes a smaller file with only the list of accounts, for starting the book of another business or a branch with the same headings. Importing it adds the accounts a book is missing; in a book that has no entries yet it can replace the list instead.

When entries have been made that are in no export — thirty entries in a book never exported, or a hundred entries or a week since the last export — a strip at the top of the page offers to export a copy.

As an app, and updates

Tap Install app at the top of the page. Installed, the Account Book opens from the home screen or the desktop in a window of its own, under your business's name, and works with no internet. When a new version is published a bar says so; Update restarts the app on it. An update replaces the app's files only — the book is kept apart from them and is never touched.

What it does not do

• One device. There is no server, so there is no sign-in, no second user and no sync between a phone and a computer. Exporting the book to a file and importing it elsewhere is how it moves.
• No filing. It does not file tax returns, make e-invoices or read a bank's feed.
• No stock items or payroll. Stock is one figure you count; wages are an expense you enter.
• No advice. It adds up what you enter. Whether an expense is allowed, or how something should be treated, is a question for an accountant.