Getting Started

When you start the app for the first time, it prompts you to create the accounts for your business. Easy Books can manage the accounts for many businesses, and you can always create more businesses later.

Example Businesses

There are some example businesses available, already pre-filled with data. You can use these to evaluate the app, produce the financial reports and see if you like using it.
* Buy & Sell is a business that buys and sells stock items. There is one purchase followed by a couple of sales. The stock sold is later devalued manually by moving the average cost per item as a cost of sales.
* IT Contractor is a simple contracting business with one worker. There are some entries in the Time Tracker that were later billed to a customer, and the payment was received from the customer about a week later. The example shows the separation between the date of the sale and the use of customer accounts to handle the later payment.
* Demosys is a company with a lot of entries. Note that this business contains about 85 transactions, and will count against your limit of 120 transactions. So when you've finished using it, remember to delete the demo business to make space. The business features supplier and customer accounts, VAT entries (some already consolidated), reconciled bank statements and some example time entries on the Time Tracker.

Template Businesses

To make it easy to create the list of accounts for your own business, there are a number of pre-defined templates defined in the app:

* Bare Bones
* Sole Trader
* Company
* Personal Accounts

Select Bare Bones if you want only the bare minimum of accounts created. This creates a bank account and the various VAT accounts.

Note: The VAT accounts are hidden from view unless you turn on VAT, by changing the settings for the business.

Company is the best choice if you are creating a set of accounts for a small business. It includes a typical set of expense and income accounts, a couple of bank accounts, petty cash and a credit card.
Note: Don't worry if the template doesn't give you all the accounts you need; you can easily add any missing accounts. For example, if you use more than one credit card just add a new credit card account as needed. Likewise, you can remove any accounts you won't need.

Once you have created a set of accounts from a template, the main screen is displayed.

If you already use the Online Sync service, you can choose to create your business as a copy of that stored online. To do this you will need your username and password that you use to access the service. Then you will see your available businesses that you can download to your Mac. Once downloaded, any changes you make are kept in-sync with your other Macs, iPhones and iPads.

Creating Another Business

If you want to create more businesses, just do the following:

Tap on the business selector on the main screen. Choose the menu option Add a business....

Later you can switch between your businesses by tapping on the business selector again.

When you add a new business to Easy Books, you can again select from a built-in template. You can also choose to use an existing business as a template for your new one. The name of the business is generated automatically.

Deleting Businesses

To delete a business, select it first, then tap on Business Settings in the navigation panel. Click the button marked Delete Business. All data associated with the business, such as transactions, invoices and time entries will be deleted permanently.

Main Screen

Once you have created a set of business accounts, the main screen is displayed. From here you can view...

* The list of accounts and their current balances,
* Bank statements for the bank accounts,
* Sales invoices you have created for your customers,
* Purchase invoices you have received from suppliers,
* Time Tracker, that you can use to log time worked for your clients (if you bill by time),
* Easy Books Sync, that merges changes from all your devices to keep everything in sync,
* Financial reports (profit and loss, balance sheet and VAT return)
* Business Settings

The sales, purchases and time-tracking icons will not be displayed if your business does not have any customer or supplier accounts set up. You don't need to use customer and supplier accounts if your customers always pay you on the date of sale, and you always pay your suppliers in the same way. You should use the supplier and customer accounts if you receive goods or services from a supplier who you pay later, or if your customers pay your invoices later. If your business is registered for VAT using a cash scheme, Easy Books uses the customer and supplier accounts to adjust the amount of VAT you owe based on whether you have received the money for your sales (and similarly whether you have paid your suppliers).

You can choose to hide some of the features of Easy Books that you won't need. For example, if your business uses a different package to generate the sales invoices for your customers, you might choose to turn off the Customer Invoicing feature completely. This reduces the number of options you see for customer accounts, and removes any associated links to the invoicing feature. Likewise, if you don't plan on using the Time Tracker, you can turn it off as well. To turn features on and off, use the ADD-ONS button shown at the top right of the window.

Business Settings

If you've just created your business, click on Business Settings, and start by giving the business a name.

If the business is VAT registered, further options are available as described in Setting Up VAT. The app can manage VAT and keeps track of sales and purchase VAT separately. It also splits VAT by category.

If the Customer Invoicing add-on is enabled, there are further options available to set the business address, logo and footer for all invoices and statements.

The Delete Business at the bottom of the basic settings list is used to delete all the business information, including its transactions (invoices, transfers and so on). There is no way to recover this information other than restoring from the backup file so be careful!

Setting Up VAT

You'll find the main VAT settings under Business Settings. Each of your businesses can be set to use a different VAT scheme.

In the business settings screen you can set the scheme, which affects how Easy Books accounts for VAT on your returns. The schemes are described briefly below, and by way of a disclaimer, you should check carefully that your business is using one of the schemes below.

You should also set the date for the next VAT period end, and the number of months in each period. Easy Books automatically updates the period end for you when you file a return, so you shouldn't need to change any of these settings again.

But I use GST...

You can set the name of your scheme (for example GST, IVA and so on). This affects the whole app, and the report output. However, your account names are not changed, so you may also like to edit the name of each VAT account as well. To do this, keep reading!

VAT Schemes

Easy Books handles the following Value Added Tax (Goods and Services Tax) schemes:
* Standard Scheme
* Cash Scheme
* Cash Scheme (sales only)
* Flat Rate (Standard)
* Flat Rate (Cash)

Standard Scheme

The difference between the standard and cash methods lies in the effective date used to record the sale or purchase. In the standard scheme, your business becomes liable to pay the sales tax you have collected from your customers on the date of invoice (which may not be the same date that you receive the payment from the customer).

Cash Scheme

If the business runs the Cash Accounting VAT scheme, any VAT owed is adjusted by unpaid balances on customer and supplier accounts. This means the business does not need to pay VAT on its sales invoices to the tax office until the business has received payment from its customers. Similarly, if the business receives an invoice for purchases, it cannot claim back the VAT amount until the payment has been made to the supplier. Easy Books can compute the adjustments if you have entered the sales and purchase invoices.

Cash Scheme (sales only)

In Ireland it is possible to run a cash based scheme for sales, but a standard scheme applies for purchases. This is the "Cash Scheme (sales only)" method in Easy Books. This means any purchases made allow you to reclaim the tax paid on the date of purchase, even if you haven't yet paid. The scheme still allows you to defer the tax you owe on any unpaid sales invoices.

Flat Rate (Standard)

Businesses using the flat rate scheme are not able to claim back any input tax (tax on purchases). They still add VAT to sales, and record the amount of VAT charged to customers. The tax due is based on a percentage of the gross income (including the tax charged).

Although tax cannot be claimed on normal purchases, it can be claimed on purchases of large assets. You will need to check the tax rules in your own country to find out what the value limits are. To cater for these purchases, Easy Books creates a new VAT account called "Vat (large assets)". For qualifying purchases, you should select this account for the purchase VAT. Easy Books will adjust the tax owed using this account in the same way as the standard scheme adjusts for purchase VAT.

When a VAT return is filed, Easy Books creates a new income account for the surplus VAT amount after paying your flat rate VAT. It also creates a new expense account for any VAT you have entered on purchases that cannot be reclaimed. You can (or may be able to) reclaim VAT on large assets, and these should be assigned using the "Vat (large assets)" account.

Flat Rate (Cash)

It is possible to mix the flat rate scheme with a cash accounting method. In this case, the sales are adjusted by unpaid balances on the customer accounts, then after the adjustments are applied, the app calculates the flat rate on the adjusted gross income. Likewise, for purchases of large assets using the "Vat (large assets)" account, these are adjusted using the balances on supplier accounts.

Setting Tax Rates

If you just need to set the standard rate, you can do this for both sales and purchases by changing the amount shown in the business settings under VAT. This is simply to save time, and all it does (behind the scenes) is set the percentage rate the same for both "Vat sale standard" and "Vat purchase standard".

To set the percentage rate of tax for each VAT account individually, find the VAT account in the main accounts list. Then double-click to show the Account Settings. Each VAT account can be given its own tax rate, which is used to speed up data entry by pre-setting the VAT amount based on the sale or purchase amount. If the rate is not set, or is incorrect, it just means you will always need to manually set the VAT amount. Remember to set the rate for both the sales and purchases!

If you need more VAT accounts, feel free to add more, putting them in the correct category (either "Tax rate on sale" or "Tax rate on purchase"). For any accounts you add, you can also set the percentage rate, and Easy Books will keep track of the VAT assigned to this account. It will also appear on the supporting calculations section of your VAT return.

You should also set the normal percentage rate as indicated in the screenshot. This is useful because Easy Books will automatically set the amount of tax for you using this rate.

Performing a VAT Return

The balances of your VAT accounts will gradually increase over time, and once your VAT return becomes due, you can use Easy Books to calculate the overall tax amount you owe. This will zero the individual VAT accounts, moving the outstanding balance over into the VAT due account. To find out how to perform the VAT return, see VAT report under the reports section.

Add-ons for Mac

You can add functions to Easy Books as you need them from the Add-ons screen. Each business is different, you can pick and choose which pieces of the software you need, leaving out the ones you don't. This way, you only pay for what you actually use, and you won't see settings and functions that you don't. We think this will give everyone a better experience using the software because it won't bombard you with irrelevant options you don't need.

Will I be charged again if I use Easy Books on a second Mac?

No! You will not be charged again for the purchase on any other Macs, as long as you use the same iTunes account. Just tap the restore button in the add-ons screen to bring your purchases over to your other Mac. And even if you try to buy the same add-on, you won't be charged twice. Note that the iOS version of the app is sold in the iTunes App Store, and is priced separately, but just like the Mac version, you can use your in-app purchases in the iOS version on all your iOS devices.

If you delete the app from your Mac and later re-install it, you can go through the same steps as if buying the item again but you will not be charged if you have already purchased it.

The prices for these add-ons are listed in the Mac App Store in your local currency and in the Add-ons screen within Easy Books. But you cannot purchase these from the Mac App Store, they are only available for purchase from within the app. To purchase, tap the Add-ons button shown in the main title bar of the app as shown above.

What can I add to Easy Books?

The following add-ons are available:

* Transactions (This increases the initial 120 transaction limit)
* Customer Invoicing (send sales invoices)
* Time-Tracker (log hours worked)
* Online Backup & Sync (let us backup for you!)

You can try Easy Books before you pay for anything: it comes with space for 120 entries. An entry (or transaction) can be a sales invoice, purchase invoice, or a transfer amount from one account to another (e.g. Cheque Account to Credit Card to pay it off, or Credit Card to Insurance). Likewise, you can create customer invoices, time-entries and you can even register for our online backup & syncing service for two weeks of free use.

What does it cost?

You can pick any of these options, but typically all businesses will need the Transactions add-on because this extends the limit of 120 entries that you can make.

* 6 months use of our syncing service is available from our secure servers or in-app from an iOS device. This item is shared between iOS and Mac devices as the service is provided directly to you and is not fulfilled by Apple.

If an item is available to buy, its is listed with the price. Once purchased, the item is displayed with the word "Installed". Note that if you have disabled the in-app purchase system on your Mac, the option to buy is not available. Other words may be displayed, such as "Connecting..." when the Mac is connecting to the Mac App Store to retrieve the product prices.

Some products can be turned off if you don't want to use them. To do this, use the checkbox marked Feature Enabled and turn the feature off. This will hide any icons from the main screen, hide any reports and other parts of the program to keep the user interface nice and simple. The Online Syncing is not available from the Mac App Store, but you can register and purchase directly from us or use Easy Books for iOS to purchase in-app. We are unable to offer this product in-app because Apple currently only provide consumables or non-consumables as the two types of product. The Online Syncing product is a non-renewable subscription.

Transactions

The app can be extended to handle more transactions by tapping the Buy button. The purchase price is shown in your local currency. The Mac App Store in-app purchase system will ask for your Apple ID and password to confirm you are able to make the purchase. Once the purchase has gone through, the app is updated immediately.

The unlimited transactions are available for the entire Mac app, not just for one business. So once you've purchased this option, you can add as many transactions as you like for all your businesses. You can also use the product on more than one Mac for no extra charge because of the way the product is marked up in the store.

If you delete the app and later re-install it, you can go through the same steps as if buying the item again but will not be charged if you have already purchased it. Or you can simply click the Restore button to bring all your previous purchases to your Mac.

You will not be charged again for the purchase on any other devices, as long as you use the same Apple ID.

Customer Invoicing

The app will create sales and purchase invoices for the purposes of bookkeeping as standard. These affect the profit and loss of the business. But the app is also capable of producing PDF sales invoices. This feature is described in Customer Invoicing along with a sample invoice in PDF format so you can see what Easy Books is capable of producing.

The app currently produces sales invoices, credit notes, receipts, refunds and remittance advice slips. It can also produce customer statements, which you can prepare from the Statements screen and send to your customers to give them a statement of their account.

Online Backup & Sync

Our Online Sync service will make sure you never forget to backup your important financial data! Over the time we have been selling Easy Books for iOS, we've been surprised at how many people have emailed to say they have replaced their device and have lost their data because they have not made a backup. The app does feature a very easy backup and restore system, which can be used to make a backup copy of your businesses. However, you need to do this manually and it's easy to put it off, or forget completely until it's too late.

By registering for our Online Sync service, you can choose to keep a copy of the Easy Books data online. Once you have uploaded your data, Easy Books uploads each change you make, as you make it. This happens silently in the background and does not interfere with what you're doing.

As well as providing backup, the system also allows you to keep multiple Macs, iPhones and iPads in sync. Each change you make is tracked by the system and when updates are available the system will alert you.

For more details, see Online Backup & Sync.

Time-Tracker

If your business makes money by charging out time to customers, you might benefit from this add-on. It keeps track of all hours worked for customers, and uses some configurable rules to produce sales invoices automatically.

You can add as many workers and customers as you like, and for each combination you can set the billable rates and rules about how to process the hours into sales invoices. The app comes with 10 time entry slots, but just like the transactions, you can increase the limit to an unlimited number.

Backup & Restore

Everyone should backup their information regularly, say every week. It's important because if something goes wrong with your Mac such as a disk drive failure, you could lose all the information you've ever entered into Easy Books.

Automatic Backup

We know it's easy to forget to backup. We've developed a service that can help. It provides continuous online backup and synchronisation of your accounts between Macs and Easy Books for iOS running on iPads and iPhones. We call it Easy Books Sync. Should disaster happen, it's good to know you have a copy of your business accounts online. You can try out the service for two weeks for free. If you like using the service, there is a six-monthly charge, which you can pay by credit card.

Manual Backup

Making a manual backup of your business data is easy. You can run a backup manually and store the backup file somewhere safe, preferably also off-site. When you later want to restore the backup, just double-click the backup file to open it on your Mac. The backup file format is the same as used on Easy Books for iOS, running on the iPhone and iPad. You can restore a backup from your Mac by sending the file to yourself as an email attachment. This will restore on your iPad easily, and of course you can do the reverse too and restore backups you've made on your iPad to your Mac.

To create a new backup, use the main application menu. Click on Businesses > Backup....

The backup system exports the database as an attachment with the file extension "easybooks_backup". When Easy Books is available on an iPad or iPhone, the mail app can pass this file easily to the Easy Books to restore the data on the device. To restore the backup file on your Mac, simply double-click it to open it.

When producing the backup, you pick which of your businesses you want to include in the backup. Backing up individual businesses is useful if you want to send a copy to a business partner without sending any other businesses or personal accounts.

It is considered best practice to create three copies of your data. One is stored in the app. A backup copy should be stored on a USB key and a third copy should be stored off-site such as in a Dropbox folder, or emailed to a GMail account.

Manual Restore

You can restore direct from the backup file by simply double-clicking on it. Alternatively you can use the Restore option from the Businesses menu.

The backup file is opened and the businesses contained in it are listed. You can choose to restore any or all of the businesses contained in the backup. The app will show which businesses will overwrite your local copy separately from those that will be added.

To go ahead with the restore, tap "Restore". If you are worried about overwriting an existing system, you can always produce a backup first, which will give you the option to restore later if you need to.

Accounts

From the main screen, click the Accounts icon to show the list of accounts. Here you can view all the accounts for the current business.

Each account is grouped under standard accounting categories such as Bank accounts, Direct expenses, Income from Sales and so on. The total value of the category is shown as well, which is useful if you have lots of bank accounts, as it shows the total balance.

The current balance of each account is shown on the right. To change the account settings, double-click on the account or select it and press ENTER. To add a new account of your own, click the + button at the top of the list.

Settings

When adding an account, give it a name and set the category. More options will appear depending on which category you choose. For customer accounts you can choose to fill in the invoice address, reference number (PO Number) and your agreed payment terms that will be used when creating invoices for the customer. See Customer Invoicing for more details. You can leave this blank if you do not intend to use invoicing, and even if you do, you can fill it in from the invoice window later.

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 Preferences.

You can add notes to each account. 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 the account number as a note.

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.

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.

Each account can be given an opening balance. If you currently use another bookkeeping package you should be able to find the closing balances for all your accounts on a certain date and use these as opening balances for Easy Books. As a check, you can run the Trial Balance report to make sure there is no "Opening Balances" line. If there is, it shows the opening balances of your accounts are not set properly.

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.

Transactions

Selecting an account brings up a list of transactions for that account. If you selected an example business, you'll see example data for some of the accounts. To edit an entry, simply double-click on it, or control-click to bring up the context menu. From here you can navigate between linked invoices and payments, delete the entry, view the PDF invoice and so on. If you selected a template business, there won't be any transactions listed initially; and you will add them gradually as you pay for things, or make sales. To add a new transaction, click on the + button in the top right of the transaction list.

The colour of the text shows whether a transactions is locked or fully editable:

Black - The transaction is editable.
Grey - The transaction is dated before the last P&L consolidation or VAT Return, or is reconciled on a statement and cannot be altered.

A transaction can be one of the following types:

* Transfer from one account to another
* Purchase from a supplier
* Sale to a customer

A transfer can be just a simple transfer of money between two bank accounts, for example a transfer from your main bank account to your savings account. Or it can be used to record an expense, such as when you might buy paper and pens (stationary) for the business. In this case you might not have a supplier account, and can simply record the purchase as a normal transfer from a bank account or credit card to the "Postage and stationary" account.

If the company uses a credit card, you will be entering purchases against the credit card account in the same way. When the credit card bill arrives, an amount is paid from the main cheque account to the credit card, perhaps by cheque or direct debit. The amount should be recorded as a transfer from the cheque account to the credit card account. You can then reconcile both the main cheque account and the credit card accounts with their paper statements.

Purchases

If you purchase items from a certain supplier regularly, and the supplier will accept your payment at a later date, you would usually add this supplier in Easy Books. This means you will record the purchase as separate from the payment. (See later for how to add purchase invoices).

One-Off Purchases (no supplier account)

If there is no supplier account, so you pay the amount due to your supplier at the same time as the purchase, or you are using simple cash accounting, the payment can be entered in one transaction. In this example, we have bought some "GSM Antennas" by mail order using a credit card. The card is listed in the business's accounts, so select the account, then the + button at the top of the transaction list to add a new entry.

Note: The option to set VAT is only available if you have told Easy Books your business is VAT registered under Business Settings.

Save the Transaction

The save button is disabled if the transaction is not valid or cannot be saved. There are a few reasons why the save button might be disabled (greyed out).

* You haven't set any of the fields yet (so there is nothing new to be saved)
* The date isn't valid (try setting it to 'today')
* The to and from accounts are not set. For double entry, there should be two accounts
* The to and from accounts are the same. You can't create a transaction from one account to itself
* If there is an amount set as VAT, the VAT account must be set too

Action Button

The action button at the top of the form is used to...

* Duplicate the current transaction
* Set up a regular transfer (every week, month and so on)
* Delete the transaction

For standing orders, you can set the transaction as a regular transfer. Easy Books creates the next transaction as a copy of the previous one when the next one becomes due. You can choose from the following periods:

* Every week, two weeks, four weeks, month, two months, three months (quarterly), or every year.

Splits

Split transactions are especially useful on sales and purchase invoices. For sales to a customer, you can divide the main transaction (the invoice) into multiple lines. You might use this to just itemise an invoice, or you might split the income into sales of goods plus another line for postage.

Likewise, for purchase invoices, you pick the supplier, then split the transaction into lots of lines, one for each type of expense. This is useful if you want to record the amount paid for postage separately from any goods you have bought.

All transactions and invoice lines can be split into multiple lines. They all share the same source account, but each linked account can be set independently. In addition, there is a "details" field, which you can use to keep extra information about the transfer. This is not presented on the transaction list screens or the financial reports. The details are used in the generation of sales invoices, where each detail line is presented on the invoice as a separate item.

Customer Invoicing

For sales invoices, you can select the invoice in the list and press SPACE or select Send invoice from the context menu. Easy Books is capable of producing professional looking invoices in PDF format that can be emailed to yourself, or direct to your customers. For more information, see Customer Invoicing. It is also possible to send receipts, remittance advice slips, refunds and copies of supplier invoices.

Purchase Invoices

When an invoice is received from one of your regular suppliers, this should be entered into Easy Books as a purchase invoice. It is not necessary to do this for one-off purchases where payment is made immediately; this is used for suppliers you have an account with. To do this, click on the Purchases icon in the main navigation panel. The list of purchase invoices is displayed. To add a new one, tap on the + in the top right of the list.

The entry screen shown allows you to set the details from the invoice. In the example screenshot, we have received an invoice for £29.79 (ex-vat) from our phone provider. We link the invoice to an expense account under Account 1, in this case we have an account in the "Indirect Expenses" category called “Phones, Internet”.

The amount to enter should be the ex-VAT figure if you are accounting for VAT, otherwise it will be the total amount. Don't worry though; the app prompts for which it is automatically. You can also change the behaviour to force all amounts to be entered including or excluding in the preferences.

When you select a VAT account, the app calculates the amount of VAT it expects based on the percentage rate you set for the VAT account.

When the purchase invoice is saved, the previous screen appears again. This time, the invoice we have entered appears in the list.

If you deal with the same group of suppliers regularly, you may find it easier to make a copy of a previous invoice line using the + button at the bottom of the entry screen. You then skip the selection of accounts, and can just change the date, and the amounts if necessary.

(Sales invoices are entered in the same way as purchase invoices. From the main screen, click on Sales).

Paying Your Suppliers

When a purchase invoice is received, typically the payment is due at some time later. So there are two lines per purchase.

In this example, we have already entered the purchase invoice from our supplier, Vodafone.

We later pay the outstanding invoice from the main bank account. To do this, tap on Accounts on the main screen, followed by the account the payment is being made from. The current list of transactions is displayed. Since we are recording a new payment from the account, tap the + button in the navigation bar just as when recording the invoice.

Note: You can also find the supplier account and enter the transaction there instead, linking it to the bank account in the same way. This example uses this method, but you can choose whichever you find easier. There is also a convenience feature called Make payment, which appears on the context menu of the purchase line. This pre-fills the payment information for you, assuming a full payment is being sent and marks the purchase as paid.

With Account 1 showing the supplier (in this example), we select the "Bank account" in Account 2 and the date the payment was made. The Debit and Credit button is used to set the direction of the payment and toggles between "Payments & Cr-Notes" and "Purchases". This time, there is no VAT to account for because this has been entered on the invoice. The app prompts you for the amount, hides the VAT options, and the label is changed to Incl-VAT as an aid.

The account for the supplier now shows two lines, one for the invoice received and the other for the outgoing payment from the cheque account. You can tell easily if there is an outstanding balance because the app keeps track of all balances on all the accounts.

Estimates

Creating estimates/quotations is simple in Easy Books. An estimate links a customer account with an income account, but does not affect your profit and loss figure, or the balances of customer accounts. You can use this feature to create estimates for customers, send them in PDF format, or you can print and post them.

To create a new estimate, use the + button at the top of the list. Select the customer, then choose the income account, the amount and the tax account. In the detail field, type the text you would like to record for the estimate. To add more than one item to the estimate, just add a split and continue with the next item. After saving the estimate, the preview panel appears showing the PDF version of the estimate. You can click the button in the preview to edit the fields such as address, company logo, estimate terms and the text labels. To send the estimate by email, simply drag the preview image over to a new email window, or use the save and print options in the popup window.

Creating a Sale

If a customer accepts your estimate and wants to go ahead with an order, you can easily create a sales invoice from the original estimate. To do this, find the estimate in the list, right-click on it and choose Create sale. This creates a new sale with the details copied across from the estimate. You can of course edit these if you need to before saving it. After you save the new sale, a tick appears next to the estimate in the list to show it has been sold. You can then navigate quickly to the sale by right-clicking on the estimate and choosing Go to Sale.

You can send the sales invoice to your customer in just the same way.

Note: If a customer account has sales or payments, the account cannot be deleted because it would affect the financial information in the accounts. But if there are no financial transactions you can delete a customer account. If a customer account is deleted, all estimates for the customer are deleted as well.

Sales

You create the sales invoice for your customers using the Sales Invoices icon. Adding a new sale is just like adding a transaction between any other accounts, the only differences being that Easy Books will filter the accounts to make it simple to find the one you're looking for. The main account is always a customer account, so you can pick from a list of customers, but also add one on the fly if you need to.

The invoice number is incremented for you each time by Easy Books, but of course you can change it if you use a different numbering scheme.

Select the "debit or credit" as either "Sales" or "Payments & Credit Notes". Usually this will be sales, so this is pre-selected for you. If you do need to refund a customer, enter it as a sales invoice, but just change the type to "Payments & Credit Notes". You can then product the credit note as a PDF if you want to and either print it yourself or email it to your customer.

Account 2 will be an income type of account, so Easy Books shows you only these to speed things up. In a similar way, the possible VAT accounts are shown too, with their defined rates against them. If you don't see the VAT account you need in the list, you can add a new VAT account from the accounts screen.

The details box is used to store a short description of the item you are selling. This is printed on the invoice to the customer, so you may use something like "15 hours labour charge", "10 Widgets", "Postage & Packing" and so on. You can easily add a split to the sale, giving you a new line on the invoice with its own amount and VAT amount.

Adding Items to the Invoice

If you want to add more lines to the same invoice, just add a split. To do this, tap the circular + button at the bottom of the sales entry form. If the invoice is valid (i.e. it has a valid date, and linked accounts) you can add a new line. A new section appears for you to link another income account to the same customer sale and type another amount and detailed description.

Customer Invoicing

Once the sale has been saved it appears in the main list of sales. You can then send your sales invoice. Easy Books is capable of producing professional looking invoices in PDF format that can be saved and emailed or printed and posted. For more information, see Customer Invoicing.

Entering Payments Received from Your Customer

When your customer pays the invoice you have sent them, which may be some time later, you should enter a second transaction. This time, assuming the customer pays by cheque and you intend to pay this into the main "Bank Account", simply create a transaction line between your bank account and the customer for the amount they have paid.

To enter the payment manually, go to the customers list by clicking on Customers in the main navigation panel. Then click on the customer you are receiving the money from. The screen shows the history of all entries you have recorded against the customer, including the sales and should show the total amount the customer owes you on the last entry at the bottom of the list. Add a new entry for the customer by clicking on the + button at the top. Simply fill in the date the payment was received, the account you are paying the money into (or petty cash if you received cash), and set the "Debit or Credit" to Payments & Cr-Notes. The amount should be set to the amount you received from the customer.

There is a faster method of entering the payment too, which works well for the case when the customer pays a single invoice in full. To use this method, find the original sale, either from the Sales screen or from the list of sales in the Customer's account screen. Once you find it, select it and use the context menu to Receive payment. This fills in the details for the payment for you, although the first time you use it you will need to pick the account you are paying into. Set the payment date and check the amount, then click Save.

If you want to enter the payments manually, you can still go through your list of sales to mark them as paid. This does not affect the books, it simply places the tick next to the sale so you can quickly see which ones you have marked in the list. To mark a sale as paid, just find it in the list first, click on it and use the context menu to Add a tick.

Entering the payment reduces the balance on your customer account, and increases the balance on your bank account. Note that the income recorded after this is unchanged, because it has been entered already in the sale. To find out about the income statement, see the profit and loss report.

Customer Invoicing

Easy Books will generate an invoice in PDF format, which you can print or save and email to your customers. If the sale is marked as a credit note, a full credit note is produced instead.

You can set your own company logo or headed paper, the from-address, customer address, invoice number, reference (PO), date, payment terms, page footer and item lines. You can also change the name of your VAT scheme (useful if you use GST), and you can change title of the invoice too, so you can change the "Sales Invoice" to read "Tax Invoice" if you prefer.

To produce a PDF invoice, select the sale in the sales list and use the context menu to Send Invoice. If you have already set the address information for the customer, you won't need to edit anything, just save or print the invoice. If you do need to make changes to the fields, click on the button at the top left of the invoice marked Show field editor. The window stretches to allow you to make changes and the invoice is updated as you type.

Your Address

If you haven't already set your business address, enter the address as you would like it to appear on the invoice, using the return key to separate each line. You can also add your office phone number and/or email address at the bottom of the address.

Company Logo / Headed Paper

There is a space of 2cm height (0.8") by up to 17cm (6.7") wide at the top of the invoice. This space is reserved for your company logo. The image you provide is scaled to the height available, and aligned on the right of the page. The business address is indented 4cm from the right side of the logo, so the best size for a company logo is 4 x 2 cm, or about 400x200 pixels. You can of course produce a complete 17cm x 2cm image for the whole top of the page. You can lay out the logo in whatever position suites you, aligning something in the image to the address would mean putting it at 13cm from the left side. If the image is less than 4cm wide, the image is aligned with the left hand side of the address.

The image above shows the key dimensions for a good header image. The file is listed in the attachments section below, so you can download it as a template for your own image.

To set the logo in Easy Books, you pick from images stored on your disk. Either drag the image into the logo field, or use the + button to select a picture from disk.

Footer

The footer occupies the bottom 1cm of the page. It is usually given over to the company registered address, the registration number and VAT registration number.

Customer Address

This address is stored against the customer record, so you only need to enter it once for each customer.

Their Reference

If your customer uses Purchase Order numbers, or use a reference number for your account with them, you can enter this in Easy Books. This is printed on the invoice or credit note.

Terms

The payment terms occupy a space towards the bottom of the page. You would typically use this to assert your payment terms, such as "Payment is due 14 days from date of invoice". You can also include your bank details for your customer to make direct transfers, and a note that all amounts are in your chosen currency; for example "All amounts above are in US Dollars".

You can set your business standard terms, which apply when there are no specific customer terms set. This helps reduce the amount of data to enter if you use the same terms for all (or most) customers. To do this, set the terms in the settings for your business rather than the customer.

Invoice Output

The invoice is produced in PDF format. A DRAFT image appears over the invoice so you can try the feature out fully. To remove the image, you can purchase the "Customer Invoicing" add-on. The invoice lists each line item and adds pages as necessary.

You can view an example invoice produced by Easy Books by downloading the PDF below.

Statement Reconciliation

Easy Books allows transactions to be reconciled against a paper statement. This is typically done using the bank statement and the electronic copy together. Each transaction shown on the bank statement should have an entry in the app. By reconciling the statements, we can see easily if there are any missing transactions that need to be recorded. Click on the Statements icon on the main navigation panel to bring up the list of accounts that use statements.

In this example, we have received a statement for the business bank account. Selecting the account shows the latest statement for that account, or starts the first statement if there isn't one. If there are previous statements, you can view them using the pop up button shown above the statement. To add a new statement, tap on the + button. The date should be set to match the date of the statement.

The opening balance should be set for the first statement only and the app keeps track of this for subsequent statements. When editing a statement, the app shows the list of transactions that do not yet appear on a statement, filtered by the statement date. Any transactions dated after the statement will not be available to move on to the statement. You can move entries onto the statement by checking the box, double-clicking the line, or by selecting and using the SPACE key. You can also drag the entries to match the same order as the paper statement. (The screenshot shows an existing statement with lines already added to it). It is not necessary to keep the transactions in the same order as the paper statement, but it can help to do this because the app calculates the statement balance on each line and this can be used as an aid if there are any differences on the paper statement. It is recommended to reconcile all statements before consolidating profit and loss or filing a VAT return because this helps as a check to make sure all transactions have been entered into Easy Books.

Time Tracker

Easy Books will keep track of time you've worked for your customers. And you can add any number of people as staff (or "workers"). For each, you can set the billable rates that you work at, for example "Normal" and "On-Call". As you enter time, you simply pick the rate and the app keeps track of the hours worked in each rate.

This is an add-on module for Easy Books, and not all businesses make money by charging out time by the hour. For those that don't, we wanted to make sure the user interface stays nice and simple. So you can turn the feature off completely in the add-ons screen. This removes the icon from the main screen, removes the report and all hides the settings specific to the Time Tracker.

Workers

The Workers drop-down shows the people in your business that work for your customers. Each of these uses a different rate card for each customer, so you can charge out people's time at different rates.

To add a new worker, click the drop-down list and choose Add Worker. To edit the name of an existing worker, click on the settings icon to the right of the drop-down.

If a member of staff leaves your business, you can hide them from normal view, or you can delete the old data. Hiding them from view will keep all the time entered available. Deleting is possible, but only if the worker is first marked as inactive. This is a safeguard against deleting the worker accidentally. If you delete the worker, all the time entries for them are deleted, but no financial entries are affected.

Customer Rate Cards

After choosing a particular worker, the list of customers that you have rate cards defined for is displayed in the customer drop-down list. Rate cards are used to tell the app about each billable rate for each customer.

To add a rate card to the list (for the selected worker), click the drop-down list and choose New Rate Card... followed by the customer. To edit an existing rate card, select the customer first, then click the settings icon to the right of the customer name.

To view the list of time entries, select a worker followed by a customer.

Online Backup & Sync

The Online Sync service provides Continuous Online Backup of your accounts. You can try the service out for two weeks, just register for an account.

If you have more than one device, the service will keep your business accounts in sync on all your Macs, iPhones and iPads.

So you might find the service useful if...

* You enter information out and about on iPad or iPhone, or
* Your accountant uses a Mac and you want to share your accounts with them, or
* You and a business partner both run Easy Books, or
* You have an iPad and an iPhone, or
* You forget to make regular backups

Online Sync is not essential for Easy Books to function, it is an optional extra. The standard backup and restore features are available for manually transferring data between devices and for creating backups.

Continuous Online Backup

You can use the service to provide peace of mind. If your iPad is stolen, lost, or damaged, you can restore your accounts to a new iPad easily. And it's impossible to forget to backup with the system running continuously in the background!

Keeping Devices in Sync

If you have more than one Mac, or you also have an iPad or an iPhone, you might want to use Easy Books on more than one device. No problem! You can backup from one and restore on the other, but there isn't an easy way to add information to both devices at the same time. This is the problem that Online Syncing aims to solve. Using the service, you can store a copy of your business data on our secure server. Other devices you own are able to access the business data. And from that point on, the system will keep track of all your devices and keep the accounts synchronised. Any changes you make, such as adding a new transaction, or reconciling a statement are passed to other devices.

How it Works

When you turn on syncing for a business, your data is copied and uploaded to our server. This first full upload is called the snapshot. Typically the upload will take about 10-15 seconds over a WiFi connection. After that, when you make a change to your business data, the changes are queued in the device for upload when the network connection is available. Only the changes are sent, and the upload happens in the background.

The server receives data from many devices, and queues the uploaded data for processing. It can take about a minute or two for the server to process your changes before they are made available to your other devices.

Your other devices check the server for new data when Easy Books is running. If new data is found, a message appears to let you know. You can then tap OK to sync the device, or tap Cancel to continue what you were doing. The syncing screen shows you when data is being downloaded and processed on the device.

You can also view the syncing history, which will show you a list of each change that was uploaded or downloaded. Some changes can conflict with others, for example, you might create an account at the same time, with the same name, under the same category, on two devices. In this case, the history will show that there is a problem. You can then pick a device and send a new snapshot. This resolves the conflict and all your other devices will download the new snapshot.

Corporation Tax

Easy Books provides the basis for working out how much corporation tax your business is liable for. Assuming the business settings are already set with the correct year end date, and that date has passed, we can run a Profit and loss report to get the operating profit.

We then need to work out the tax owing, and enter this and the payment(s) in Easy Books. To do this, follow these steps.

1. Calculating the tax your business owes can be simple, but it depends on your business and the tax rules that apply. In my own situation, I do this using the P&L report as a basis, adding back any depreciation, applying capital allowances and so on. Your accountant may handle your tax calculation for you, and supply you with the final figure for the tax owed. Once you have the figure, enter this dated on the last day of your tax period. This is a transfer between the Profit and Loss account (under Capital) and the Corporation tax due (under Creditor). Don't worry if your P&L account goes negative for now, the next step will transfer your total profit into this account.
2. Run the P&L report again, and this time use the option to Consolidate. This will close off the tax year, lock it. You will then only be able to add new entries dated after it. The overall profit is transferred to the Profit and Loss account, which should now show a positive balance (we hope).
3. When you eventually settle the tax bill, you probably pay by cheque or by transfer from your bank account. Assuming this, you should enter a new transaction from your bank account. Pick the date as the date you pay the tax, set the amount and pick Corporation tax due as the other account. If you pay an instalment, just use that amount. Easy Books will reduce the balance showing as owed on the Corporation tax due account and reduce the bank account balance. Most likely you'll pay the whole tax amount in one payment. In this case you'll expect to see the balance on Corporation tax due return to zero.

Reports

Easy Books produces financial reports for your business.

Each report is produced in HTML format for display, and CSV format for easier import into spreadsheets, or for sending to an accountant. The reports can be saved in either format, or both contained in a single ZIP file. You can also print the report straight from the app.

As well as producing the reports, the report screen also allows you to consolidate the Profit and Loss, and perform the VAT return. These actions zero the account balances for the start of the new financial period. End of year profit is posted to the 'profit and loss' account, which you can then move into a 'retained earnings' account if you wish.

Use the links below to view more information about each report, including screenshots of the demo business and the reports produced.