Easy Books

On the account list screen, you will see the current balance of each account shown on the right together with a circular black information button. Tapping on the icon will show the settings available for that account. You can easily add a new account to the list, just tap the + button at the top.

When adding an account, set the category first. For customer and supplier accounts you can choose to fill in the information from the Contacts on the iPhone or iPad. To do this, tap the action button at the bottom of the account settings screen. This will only appear for customer and supplier accounts, so be sure to pick the category first. The following information is transferred from the Contacts:

* Company name
* Contact name
* Postal addresses (invoice address, then delivery address if present)
* Email address

The link is not maintained permanently; if you change the information in Easy Books it will not be overwritten by any changes to the Contact.

It can be useful to hide accounts as time goes on, perhaps when all work with a particular customer or supplier has finished. The account cannot be deleted if there are transactions on it, so in this case, the account can be marked as inactive. Any inactive accounts are hidden from the lists unless you choose to display inactive accounts in Settings.

To change the settings for an account that already exists, tap the small arrow button to the right of the account balance.

You can add notes to each account (since version 3.0). The notes are not used by the app in any reports or invoices, so you can use them to keep any information you like about your account. As an example, you might keep contact information for customer and supplier accounts.

For VAT accounts there is an additional setting available to set the rate of tax. Each VAT account should be set up with the current rate, remembering to do this for both the purchase and sales VAT accounts. This allows you to use any number of VAT accounts, and Easy Books will calculate the tax amount using the rates you choose.

For customer accounts, you can store their invoice address, reference number (PO Number) and your agreed payment terms. This information is used to create the sales invoices if that product is installed. See Customer Invoicing for more details.

Container Accounts

It is possible to group accounts into one container. This is useful if you want to hide individual account balances on a profit and loss statement. For example, you might want to reveal the total employee costs for your business, but not the individual costs for each employee. To do this, create a container account called "Employee costs", then for each real account, set its category as the container account.

You would normally go on to edit or create the accounts for customers and suppliers (and so on). Once all the accounts have been set up with opening balances, you can begin entering transactions such as transfers and invoices.

Note: If running the Cash Accounting VAT scheme, it is best to enter all the unpaid invoices rather than setting an opening balance. If an opening balance is set instead, the app cannot tell what proportion of the balance is VAT content and assumes the standard VAT rate applies to the balance. If it has access to the invoices, it will correctly apportion VAT content using the average amounts from the most recent unpaid invoices.