Read Me First

Welcome. This is the front door to AI-Native Accounting Software — a program that keeps a business's financial records ("the books") accurately and permanently, brings in your bank activity, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest how each item should be recorded while a person always makes the final decision. This document is written for someone who has never seen the project before and doesn't need any accounting or technical background. Read it top to bottom in about twenty minutes, or jump straight to the question you have:

1. Who this is for
2. What it does
3. The world it lives in
4. What surrounds it
5. The first thing to do
6. Setting up your complete environment
7. Day-to-day use
8. Weekly, monthly, and long-term duties
9. Glossary — plain words for every term
10. Where to go next

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1. Who this is for

Four kinds of people get value from this software. You'll probably recognise yourself in one of them:

• Founders and business operators without accounting training. You run a startup or small business. You need books you can trust, a clear picture of money coming in and going out, and as little manual data entry as possible — without hiring a finance team just to stay organised.
• Accountants and bookkeepers, whether in-house or at a firm looking after many clients. You live in the books every day: coding transactions, reviewing what the AI suggests, approving entries, closing each month, and producing financial statements. This software is built to make that work faster without ever taking the decision out of your hands.
• Finance leaders at organisations that must run their own systems. Some organisations — for legal, regulatory, or policy reasons — cannot put their financial records in someone else's cloud service. This software is self-hostable: you can run the entire thing on computers you control, with real access control and a complete, tamper-evident history of every change.
• Developers and integrators. The software is open source (its full program code is public and free to use and modify) and everything the screens can do is also available to other programs through its API — a documented way for software to talk to software — so it can be wired into other systems.

2. What it does

In one sentence: it keeps a permanent, always-balanced set of books, pulls in your bank activity, lets AI do the tedious suggesting, and leaves every decision with a human.

Breaking that down:

• It keeps the books using double-entry accounting — the centuries-old method every accountant trusts, where each event is recorded in two places (what you got, and where it came from) so the records always balance and errors have nowhere to hide. The software refuses any entry that doesn't balance, and once an entry is recorded it can never be quietly changed or deleted — mistakes are corrected by recording a visible reversal.
• It brings in your bank activity. Transactions arrive from a connected bank feed or from statement files you upload, and queue up for review.
• AI suggests, you decide. For each incoming transaction, the software proposes which account it belongs to, with a plain-language reason and a confidence level. You accept, correct, or reject. AI can also draft whole accounting entries — but drafts wait for a person to approve them.
• It handles the paperwork of trading: creating sales invoices, tracking the bills you owe, recording payments, and showing who owes what and for how long.
• It produces the standard financial reports — the trial balance (the proof that the books balance), the income statement (profit and loss), the balance sheet (what the business owns, owes, and is worth), and cash flow — straight from the ledger (the master record of every entry: "the books"), with every number traceable back to the entries behind it.

The one rule to understand about the AI: the AI in this software only ever proposes. It never posts anything to your books on its own. A human must approve every AI-suggested entry before it becomes part of the record, and every suggestion is stored with the AI's reasoning and confidence so an auditor can always see what was suggested, by what, and who approved it. Your books stay a human's legal record — the AI is a fast assistant, not an accountant of record.

3. The world it lives in

This software serves the occupation of bookkeeping and accounting — the practice of recording every financial event of a business (sales, purchases, payments, salaries) so that the business always knows its true position and can prove it. The books of a business are not just notes; in most countries they are legal records used for tax filings, audits, raising investment, and settling disputes. That is why this software is so strict about balance, permanence, and traceability.

The business contexts it is built for:

• Startups and small-to-medium businesses that want modern, AI-assisted bookkeeping without the cost or lock-in of the big commercial packages.
• Accounting and bookkeeping firms managing the books of many client companies.
• Regulated or privacy-sensitive organisations — those that must keep financial data on their own infrastructure and prove exactly who changed what and when.

It supports the two major rulebooks of accounting — GAAP (used mainly in the United States) and IFRS (used across most of the rest of the world). Each organisation chooses one when it is set up. Amounts can be recorded in multiple currencies, with everything also carried in your organisation's home ("base") currency.

4. What surrounds it

No accounting system lives alone. Here is the traffic in and out, and the people involved:

People who sign in. Every user belongs to an organisation with one of five roles, from most to least powerful:

Role	In plain words
Owner	The person ultimately responsible — full control, including membership
Admin	Runs the system day to day — settings, members, periods
Accountant	Approves and posts entries, closes periods, produces statements
Bookkeeper	Records day-to-day activity and reviews bank transactions
Viewer	Can look, cannot change anything

Signing in happens through a shared login service (single sign-on): you use one identity across the platform's applications rather than a separate password for each. Your account in the books is tied to that login identity.

What flows in. Bank transactions — either through a connected bank feed that syncs automatically where available, or through statement files (the common CSV and OFX formats every bank can export) that you upload. Also invoices you raise, bills you receive, and the contact details of the customers and suppliers you trade with.

What flows out. Sales invoices to your customers; financial statements and reports for owners, accountants, lenders, and auditors; and, for integrators, everything is reachable by other software through the API.

Who consumes the results. Your own team, your external accountant at year end, auditors who need to trace numbers to their source, and tax authorities via the filings your accountant prepares from these reports.

5. The first thing to do

What "first" means depends on how you arrived. There are three doors in:

a) You're trying the demo

The demo is a disposable, pre-loaded instance: it opens straight onto the dashboard of a fictional sample company, Northwind Trading Co., with realistic books already in place. There is nothing to set up. The best first move is simply to explore in this order: Dashboard → Chart of accounts → Journals → Banking → Invoices → Statements — that's the same tour as Day-to-day use below.

Demo data is disposable. A demo instance exists for a short, fixed time and is then removed, along with everything in it. Don't record anything you want to keep in a demo.

b) You're starting a fresh, real installation

For a real installation, your organisation is created before anyone signs in, by whoever operates your installation, using the guarded initialization procedure described in production-initialization.md. That procedure creates the essentials: your organisation (name, country, home currency, choice of GAAP or IFRS, financial year), the first owner account, a standard chart of accounts, the first financial year split into monthly periods, and two neutral tax codes.

So the first thing you do in the app is:

1. Sign in with the owner identity that was set up for you.
2. Look around before touching anything: open Chart of accounts and confirm the account list suits your business (you can add or rename — though a few system accounts the software depends on are protected), and check the organisation basics you were set up with.
3. Then work through Setting up your complete environment.

Initialization wipes data. The initialization procedure is deliberately destructive: run against a system that already has data, it deletes that data (it has multiple safeguards and confirmations, but the end result is permanent). It is a first-use tool, not a reset button — and on any real system, a database backup comes first.

c) You're joining an existing installation

If your organisation already uses the software, you'll be invited by an owner or admin and assigned a role. Sign in, find your organisation (if you belong to more than one, there's a switcher at the top of the screen), and start at Day-to-day use. An installation can host more than one organisation; creating an additional one is an administrator action — ask whoever operates your installation.

6. Setting up your complete environment

Do these once, in this order, and the system is fully ready for daily work. The names in bold are the entries in the app's left-hand navigation.

1. Review the chart of accounts (Chart of accounts). This is the list of labelled "buckets" every transaction is filed into — things you own (assets), things you owe (liabilities), what the business is worth (equity), money earned (revenue), and money spent (expenses). A standard set is created for you; add or adjust accounts to fit your business. A few system accounts (like Accounts Receivable and Retained Earnings) are protected from deletion because the software relies on them.
2. Invite your team (Members). Add each person and give them one of the five roles from section 4. Give people the least power they need — you can always promote later.
3. Add your real tax rates. After initialization only two neutral codes exist (Exempt and Zero-rated) — placeholders that make invoicing work, not your country's actual rates. Adding your jurisdiction's real rates (VAT, GST, sales tax) is currently done through the software's API rather than a screen — ask your installation's administrator or your accountant to load them before you start invoicing.
4. Record your contacts (Contacts). The customers you invoice and the suppliers who bill you.
5. Connect your bank (Banking). Add each real bank account, then get transactions flowing: upload a statement file (CSV or OFX — every bank's online portal can export one) or, where available, connect a live bank feed that syncs on demand. Uploading a file is the path that always works, so start there.
6. Confirm your periods (Periods). Check the financial year and its monthly periods match how your business reports.

That's the whole setup. From here on, the software's job is to keep the daily work small.

7. Day-to-day use

A working session usually looks like this:

Start at the Dashboard. It shows the state of the books for the current period, what customers owe you (accounts receivable), what you owe suppliers (accounts payable), and a feed of recent activity — including anything waiting for a human decision.

Review incoming bank transactions (Banking). New transactions line up with the AI's proposed account for each, a plain-language reason, and a confidence level shown as a percentage and a high/medium/low band. For each one you either Accept (this is the moment a balanced entry is written to the books and the transaction is marked reconciled — matched to the bank's record), Correct (choose the right account — the system records your correction and uses it to make better suggestions next time), or Reject. Re-imported or duplicate transactions are recognised and not booked twice, and an auto-match assistant pairs bank lines with entries already in the books.

Work the journal when needed (Journals). The journal is the formal list of accounting entries. Each entry moves through a clear workflow — draft → pending review → approved → posted — and only posted entries are part of the permanent ledger. AI-drafted entries appear in pending review, waiting for a person.

Posted means permanent. A posted entry can never be edited or deleted — by anyone. If it's wrong, you post a reversal: a mirror-image entry that cancels it, leaving both visible. This is not a limitation; it is what makes the books trustworthy. Expect it, and don't look for an edit button.

Handle invoices and bills (Invoices). Raise sales invoices and record supplier bills; issuing one automatically writes the correct entry to the books — no manual journal work for everyday trading. Recording payments moves each document through issued → partially paid → paid, and the AR/AP aging screen shows what's overdue, by how long, per customer and supplier.

Check the numbers (Trial balance, Statements). The trial balance proves the books tie — total debits equal total credits, to the cent. The statements screen produces the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow for any period, and every line can be drilled down to the exact entries behind it. The Audit trail screen shows the permanent history of who did what, and when.

8. Weekly, monthly, and long-term duties

Software keeps the books; people keep the discipline. Here is the rhythm that keeps an installation healthy:

Regularly (weekly or as activity warrants)

• Review and clear the bank transaction queue — books are most useful when they're current.
• Reconcile: confirm the bank's records and your books agree (the auto-match assistant does the heavy lifting; you confirm).

Each period (typically monthly)

• Finish recording everything for the period, then close the period (Periods). Closing locks it: nothing further can be posted into a closed period, which is what makes your reported numbers final. A period can be reopened by an authorised person if something must be corrected before the books are truly final.
• Run and keep the period's reports — trial balance, income statement, balance sheet — as your record of the period.

Occasionally / long-term

• Back up your data — this is yours to own. On a self-hosted installation, no one else is backing up your database. Put a regular backup in place, know how to restore it, and always take a backup before anything destructive (like re-initialization). If data is lost without a backup, there is no way back.
• Keep tax rates current. When your jurisdiction changes a rate, it must be updated here (see section 6, step 3).
• Review who has access (Members) as people join and leave, and keep roles as small as jobs allow.
• Leave history alone. The audit trail and posted entries are permanent by design. There is no periodic "cleanup" of financial history in this system — and that's a feature, not an oversight. The only operations that destroy data are demo expiry and re-initialization.
• Start the next financial year when one ends, so new periods exist to post into.

9. Glossary

Plain words for every term this document uses.

Term	In plain words
Accounts payable (AP)	Money your business owes to suppliers — bills you haven't paid yet
Accounts receivable (AR)	Money customers owe your business — invoices they haven't paid yet
AI confidence	How sure the AI is about a suggestion, shown as a percentage and a high/medium/low band
API	A documented way for one program to talk to another — how integrators connect this software to other systems
Audit trail	The permanent, unchangeable log of who did what in the system, and when
Balance sheet	The report showing what the business owns, owes, and is worth at a point in time
Bank feed	A live connection to your bank that brings transactions in automatically
Base currency	Your organisation's home currency; amounts in other currencies are also carried in this one
Chart of accounts	The organised list of labelled "buckets" every transaction is filed into
CSV / OFX	Common file formats banks use for exported statements; you can upload either
Debit / credit	The two sides of every double-entry record; for every transaction they must add up equally
Double-entry	The bookkeeping method where every event is recorded in two places so the books always balance
Fiscal (financial) period	A slice of the financial year — usually a month — that entries are posted into and reported on
GAAP / IFRS	The two major rulebooks for how accounts are prepared (US / most of the rest of the world)
General ledger	The master record containing every posted accounting entry — "the books"
Income statement	The report of money earned and spent over a period — also called profit and loss (P&L)
Journal entry	One recorded accounting event, made of balancing debit and credit lines
Open source	Software whose full program code is public and free to use, inspect, and modify
Period close	Locking a finished period so nothing more can be posted into it — making its numbers final
Posting	The act of making an entry part of the permanent ledger; posted entries can only be reversed, never edited
Reconciliation	Confirming your books and your bank's records agree, item by item
Reversal	A mirror-image entry that cancels a wrong posted entry, leaving both visible
Role	What a signed-in person may do: owner, admin, accountant, bookkeeper, or viewer
Self-hosted	Run on computers your organisation controls, rather than a vendor's cloud
Trial balance	The check-report proving total debits equal total credits across all accounts

10. Where to go next

• Setting up a real installation — the operator's step-by-step procedure (safeguards, exactly what gets created, and how the first owner is linked to their login): production-initialization.md
• Full feature overview and project background — the repository's README

A note on what's coming: some capabilities described in the project's broader plans — such as revenue-recognition automation, startup metrics like burn rate and runway, multi-entity consolidation, e-invoicing formats, and a natural-language "ask the ledger" interface — are not yet available in the software this document describes. Everything in sections 1–9 is present and working today.