This article is for the accountant or bookkeeper who works in someone else's books: how you get in, what you can do at each level, how you propose a correction without touching the ledger, and how the year is handed to you.
Getting in
Your client invites you from their Settings, under Access, by email. You set your own password once and sign in with it from then on; every company you were given appears on your dashboard, and nothing else does. If several clients use kBooks, each invitation lands in the same sign-in, so one login opens all of their books.
What each level lets you do
Your client chooses a level per company:
- Read only: every screen, every report, printing and exporting. You change nothing.
- Read and suggest (Accountant): everything above, plus the right to propose correcting entries that the client approves or declines.
- Read and write: you do the bookkeeping yourself. Books Settings is yours, except its Access section: who gets in is decided by whoever holds grant access.
- Read, write and grant access: you also decide who else may open these books.
Ask for the level that matches the engagement. A year-end review usually needs Read and suggest; a bookkeeper who runs the month needs Read and write.
Reviewing without changing anything
At Read only and Read and suggest, the books open exactly as the owner sees them: Banking, Transactions, Reports, Documents, the Tax tab. Every report prints and downloads. The buttons that would change something are simply not there, so nothing you click can move a balance.
Proposing a correction
On the Transactions tab, press Suggest a correction. You draft a journal entry: the date, balanced debit and credit lines, and a note that says why. The note is required, and it is what the client reads first, so write it the way you would say it: "Reclass half of Meals as non-deductible."
Nothing posts. Your draft goes to the client's queue, where they see the full entry, your note and your name, and choose Approve and post or Decline with a reason. If they approve, the entry posts under both names: suggested by you, approved by them, forever. If they decline, the reason comes back to you under Suggestions on the same tab, where every draft you sent shows what happened to it.
You may suggest into a year the client has already locked. That is what year-end corrections are; the client resolves the lock when they approve.
Closing the month and the year
The client's month-end runs through the close checklist described in Closing the month. For the year, the Tax tab holds two things built for you:
- Tax workpapers: the working trial balance by tax line, adjusting and reclassifying entries, and the freeze that pins the year once the return is filed. See Tax workpapers.
- Year-end package: one download holding the trial balance, the general ledger, the working trial balance, the adjusting entries, the Income Tax summary, the 1099 summary and detail, and every document dated inside the year, with a README that names each file.
The Trial Balance report's download menu also offers the balance in the layouts tax programs import, one for Lacerte, one for UltraTax CS, and a plain sheet for other programs. See Reports.
Asking the client for something
The receipt you cannot find, the wire you cannot place: open the entry and press Ask the client in its action bar. The window proposes the title from the entry; pick Document or Question, set the due date and send. The request appears on the client's Requests tab and Overview, they answer in place, and a receipt they hand over attaches itself to the entry. Your Clients list counts what waits on each client and what came back. The full article: Requests between you and your accountant.
Your firm's invoice, and your name on the papers
On Plan and standing, a firm sees one invoice for every set of books it looks after: its own companies (its own firm free, when the plan says so) and every client account whose bill rides on the firm's, each company at the firm's rate. Your kBooks operator attaches a client's account to your bill on request; that client's own Plan page then says who pays. Card payment is not connected yet, so the card shows the invoice as it will read.
Your firm on the papers names the firm and takes its logo. Every report you print for a client and every year-end package you build for them then carries a "Prepared by" line with your name and mark. Your own firm's books, and a client's own customer papers (their invoices and statements), are never branded this way.
Several clients at once
Clients, at the top of the dashboard, is the practice's list: one row per company you were given, on any of your logins, with the state of its books read from the data. Bank lines to review, accounts not reconciled, months not closed, suggestions waiting, documents not entered, what is due, the last entry and the cash, each a click into that work. Amber means something blocks the close; blue means something waits; green means the books are flowing. Filter to Needs attention and work down the list, or turn on Open the client list when I sign in and start there every morning. The article Your clients, one list has every column.
Your dashboard still shows every company as a card, in the groups you arrange. Inside a company, the company name at the top opens the switcher to the next one. Each company answers to its own level: you can be Read only in one and Read and write in another, and the screens follow.