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 or balance sheet. 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 can also drag accounts into a container account to make this easier to set up.
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.