Easy Business App for Bookkeepers & Accountants

Claire Easy Payslip
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Overview

This article is intended for bookkeepers and accountants — however, if you are a business owner, you may still find this article useful to get a deeper dive into how Easy Business App works.

Easy Business App is a full double-entry accounting system that is easy to use for your clients, but offers you the accounting flexibility and power you are used to in other software packages.

This article includes some key concepts and explains how (and why) we do certain things.

We also recommend you familiarise yourself with the other help documents in this section, especially around creating manual journals, categorising and matching and processing ATO payments/BAS and Super.

Table of Contents

Category vs Account

You will see throughout the app that we use the term 'category' instead of 'account' as it is more friendly to the business owner. The Chart of Accounts (CoA) is therefore what we call the Categories screen in the app. And creating a new account is "Create New Category". In this article, we'll refer to accounts as the more familiar accounting term! You can create, edit and delete categories to customise the CoA for each organisation.

Ins and Outs

We use "Ins" and "Outs" to refer to anything in the system that has an accounting impact. All of these documents will show up in the Ins & Outs screen. These documents make real changes to your books and are reflected in your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, BAS reports etc... So, whenever anything happens that has an accounting impact in Easy Business App, some kind of In/Out is created. For example:

  • User manually creates an Expense after filling up at the petrol station. An Out is created.
  • User manually records an invoice payment in Easy Invoice. A Customer Payment (In) is created.
  • User categorises an expense from the Bank Transactions screen. An Out is created.
  • User creates a payslip in Easy Payslip. A Wages Payment (Out) is created (note these don't currently show in the Ins/Outs tab, because they create a special kind of system journal. You can see them in reports like the GL Detail report instead).

This means there is one place where you can see every in and out (apart from payroll) that happens in the business. In other accounting systems you generally have to go to many different screens to see this, or run a report. Easy Business App makes this, well... Easy :)

"I'm Not Sure" Transactions

We encourage business owners to use the special "I'm not sure" button when categorising bank transactions they have some doubts about:

You can find these transactions in the Not Sure tab of the Bank Transactions screen. Accounting documents have not been created for these items, so they will need to be categorised/matched to ensure a fully accurate picture as well as to ensure accurate bank account reconciliation.

GST

  • There is one GST account is Easy Business App.
  • Invoices created in Easy Invoicing with line items that attract GST will credit this GST account and expenses created in Easy Cashflow that attract GST will debit this account.
  • You cannot delete or change this account.
  • Every account in the Chart of Accounts (we call this the more business-friendly Categories List) has a default Tax Type. You can change these defaults for most accounts.
  • When creating manual expenses or income documents, or categorising bank transactions, the user can change the Tax Type.
  • If an organisation is not registered for GST, they will only see the "N/A" Tax Type when creating expense/income documents or categorising bank transactions. And they cannot create invoice line items that attract GST.
  • Business users do not see the GST account in the Categories drop-down list when creating business documents to prevent them doing anything weird with it!
  • You as the accountant can obviously create manual journals to the GST account.
  • GST is calculated at a line item level. We do not provide a default Rounding account, but you can create one if you would prefer to have one for handling any unusual edge cases or dealing with migrations from other systems.

Owner Drawings/Deposits

  • There are two accounts for handling money owing/owed to/from the business: Owner/Director Drawings and Owner/Director Deposits.
  • When a user creates a manual Expense and chooses the Paid From account as "Personal (Non-Business Account) this will create a debit against the Owner/Director Drawings account. A manual Income will correspondingly use the Owner/Director Deposits account.
  • When a user clicks the Assign to Personal button when categorising a bank transaction (pictured below), this will create a line item on the categorise screen to assign some (or all) of the amount as a debit against the Owner/Director Deposits account. And vice versa for an income item with the Owner/Director Drawings account.

Payroll in Easy Payslip

  • Easy Business App creates one journal per payslip when creating a payrun. This simplifies reporting and also allows payslip matching in Easy Cashflow.

Bank Account Reconciliation

We handle this slightly differently (and more transparently) than a lot of other systems. Read more in our help guide Understanding Bank Account Reconciliation.

Migrating to Easy Business App

Migrating users from other providers (or from manual spreadsheets!) is straight-forward:

  • Create a New Organisation for the business. You can do this from your Advisor Portal by clicking Add New Client in the top-right of the screen. You can either enter the organisation details yourself, or enter the client's business name and email and we will send them a link to do it themselves. You will automatically gain Administrator access if you invite them to do it themselves, and the business owner will also be the billing owner. Note that you can always change these roles later to suit.
  • Ask the business owner to connect their business bank account(s) and credit cards in Easy Cashflow. Alternatively you can create manual bank accounts and upload CSV files. You can also link accounts, import transactions and then upload CSV files for the historic transactions for that account prior to the first bank feed item.
  • When the business owner links their account(s) the system will automatically create an Opening Balance Journal for each linked account, dated on the date of the earliest imported transaction (as chosen by the user) . You can find (and edit if needed!) these journals in Easy Reports >> For Advisors >> Journals.
  • You can edit this existing opening balance journal to enter the other balance sheet sheet entries, and profit loss entries if necessary.  We have an Opening Balance Conversion account to offset these against if you choose to do them in separate journals.
  • For accounts receivable, we do provide a Manual Accounts Receivable account that you can journal to, as we don't allow you to directly post to the real Accounts Receivable account (we do this so the customer ledger can't get out of sync with the AR account).
    • Alternatively, its preferable for you (or the business owner) to re-create any outstanding invoices in Easy Invoicing.
  • You are also able to post journals for previous years so you have an historical record of prior years.
  • For businesses with employees who will be using Easy Payslip to report STP, you can refer to the help article: Add Year To Date (YTD) values in Easy Payslip and STP for New Users. Note that you do not have to contact the ATO at any stage when migrating users to Easy Payslip, as we handle all the necessary communications via the first STP submission.

End of Year - Retained Earnings and Current Year Earnings

There is no formal "end of year" process in Easy Business App. Instead, we automatically calculate and show Current Year Earnings and Retained Earnings on the following reports:

Report Name Current Year Earnings? Retained Earnings?
Profit & Loss Not shown Not shown
Balance Sheet Current Year Earnings = Net Profit figure from Profit & Loss report run from start of the reporting period Financial Year to the Balance Sheet report "As At" report date. Retained Earnings = Net Profit from the P&L report from the first ever recorded transaction in the system to the last day of the financial year prior to the report date PLUS any Manual Journals against the Retained Earnings account.
Trial Balance Report Not Shown Calculated the same as Balance Sheet
GL Summary Report Not Shown Will only show where report range spans more than one Financial Year. Calculated the same as Balance Sheet
GL Detail Report Not Shown Will only show where report range spans more than one Financial Year. Calculated the same as Balance Sheet. The doc type is 'System Closing Entry'.

Handling transactions prior to the first bank feed transaction

Some banks will only provide up to 3 months of data when linked via Easy Cashflow, which could mean you have a 'gap' of transactions missing from 01/07 to the date of the first bank feed item.

You can close this gap by:

  • Uploading the missing bank transactions via CSV (recommended), -or-
  • Manually create the Ins/Outs in the gap period if there are only a few, -or-
  • Journal in the P&L account totals.

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