SBB Accountant — your books, natively (Windows)

SBB Accountant is a desktop application that keeps a complete copy of your general ledger on your own computer. Open it on a plane, in a shop with no network, or during an outage, and your trial balance, profit & loss and balance sheet are still there — calculated on the machine in front of you, not fetched from a server.

It is a companion to the web app, not a replacement. Your books live on SBB as they always have; this is a second, always-available window onto them.

⬇ Download SBB Accountant for Windows (.exe)

One-click installer · Windows 10/11 (64-bit) · If SmartScreen warns, choose More info → Run anyway.

macOS and Linux are planned. Windows first, because that is where the spreadsheets are.

Who it is for

• Business owners who want their accounting available instantly, without waiting on a browser or a connection.
• Anyone who closes a month and wants the statements on screen while they work through the paperwork.
• Accountants and bookkeepers — the firm view arrives in a later version; today the app covers one business at a time.

Month-end in Excel — and posted back

This is the part no other system does.

Press Export working paper and you get a real Excel file: your trial balance, with two shaded columns beside it for adjustments and a column for memos. It is the sheet you would have built yourself.

Work in it exactly as you always have. Excel totals your adjustments as you type and tells you "Balanced" or "Out by 30,000" right there in the sheet — so you know the journal ties before you go anywhere near your books.

Save the file. That is the whole interaction; there is nothing to upload. SBB Accountant notices, reads your adjustments, and shows you exactly what would be posted. Only when you press the button does anything reach your books, as one journal you can find, read and reverse later.

Your spreadsheet is a proposal, never a posting.

Reconcile a bank account — in Excel

The other job that lives in a spreadsheet, on the same round trip.

Choose an account, press Export reconciliation, and you get every posting in your books with a column to tick off what appeared on your statement. Enter the closing balance from the statement at the top.

Excel does the rest as you work: balance per books, what has cleared, what is still outstanding, and a cell that says “Reconciled” or “Still to explain”. You never have to come back to SBB to find out whether it ties — only to file it.

Found a bank charge nobody booked? Add it at the bottom with new in the On statement column. When you file the reconciliation, that charge posts as a journal and the reconciliation is recorded against the account — the same record the web app and the month-end board already use.

The arithmetic it proves is the one you would do by hand:

statement balance + still outstanding = balance per books

Anything left over is shown as an amount, so you know exactly what you are looking for.

Editing an amount on an existing row does nothing. Only your ticks and the new rows you add are read back — a stray keystroke in Excel cannot restate a transaction that is already in your books.

The whole report pack, in one workbook

Press Export report pack and you get a single Excel file containing every statement for the period you chose: a cover, the trial balance, profit & loss, balance sheet, where the money is, and the full general ledger.

It is the thing you would otherwise build by hand out of five screens — and it is formatted to be read, printed and filed rather than edited.

• The cover leads with the business, the period, the currency, and whether the books tie. Nobody should meet a wall of numbers without knowing what they are looking at.
• If the books don’t balance, the pack says so — on the cover, before any figure. A pack that doesn’t balance should never leave looking finished.
• Every posting names who recorded it. “Who put this through?” is the first question asked of anything surprising.
• Reversals are labelled, not hidden, so the audit trail survives the export.

Where the money is

A view of every place money sits — each bank account, cash drawer and mobile money wallet by the name you gave it, not by a ledger code. It flags anything overdrawn, and shows where the ledger and SBB’s own running balance disagree, which is exactly what a reconciliation exists to explain.

It refuses to guess

A working paper is only trustworthy if it cannot quietly post to the wrong place. So:

• Sort, filter or rearrange the rows freely. Every row carries a hidden link to its account, so an adjustment always lands where it belongs — never on whatever happens to be on that row number.
• Rows you type yourself are skipped, and you are told which and why. Excel turns a code like 0042 into the number 42; rather than guess which account you meant, SBB refuses the row.
• A debit and a credit on the same row is refused, as is a negative adjustment — put the amount in the other column instead.
• Nothing unbalanced can be posted, and you are shown the exact gap.

If a period is closed, SBB says so and refuses the journal, exactly as it would on the web.

What you get

Screen	What it shows
Overview	Whether the books tie, net income, total assets — plus income against expenses by month, and where your money sits
Trial balance	Every account with debits, credits and balance, as of any date
Profit & loss	Income and expenses for any period, with net profit or loss
Balance sheet	Assets, liabilities, equity and retained earnings as of any date
Account ledger	Every posting behind a single account, newest first
Working papers	Export to Excel, adjust, review and post
Bank reconciliation	Tick off your statement in Excel, then file it
Where the money is	Every account, drawer and wallet, with overdrafts flagged
Reports	The whole pack — every statement in one Excel workbook

Every one of these works with the network unplugged.

Getting around quickly

Press Ctrl+K anywhere to jump to a screen or straight to an account by name — type three letters of it rather than hunting a dropdown. The app also reopens on the screen you left it on.

The dashboard charts are live: hover the trend for a month's income, expenses and net, and click any account bar to open the postings behind it.

Any currency

SBB Accountant is multi-currency in the same way the rest of SBB is. Your business has a base currency, and postings may be in any other currency. Each posting is converted at the exchange rate it was recorded with, not today's rate — so a closed month's figures never move afterwards.

Two details that matter:

• Statements are stated in your base currency, whatever that is. Nothing is assumed.
• The account ledger keeps the original amount too. A USD invoice shows as USD alongside its base-currency value, so it still ties back to the document it came from.

If a posting is in another currency and has no exchange rate recorded, the app says so rather than quietly presenting a total as exact.

Your books are encrypted on your computer

This app puts a full general ledger on a laptop, so:

• The local file is encrypted, with the key held in Windows' own credential store — never in a file next to the data.
• If Windows cannot store that key securely, the app refuses to run rather than saving your books unprotected.
• Signing out deletes the local copy. Nothing is left behind on a shared or returned machine.

Losing the local copy is never a problem: your books live on the server, and the app rebuilds its copy on the next sign-in.

How syncing works

The app keeps a running position and asks the server only for what is new. If the connection drops mid-download, it resumes exactly where it stopped — nothing is skipped and nothing is counted twice.

Deleted transactions. When something is removed from your books, SBB records a reversing entry rather than erasing history. In the app you will see both the original and its reversal, with the original struck through. The two cancel out, so your totals are correct, and you keep the record of what happened — which is what an auditor will ask for.

The header shows either Offline ready (everything is on this computer) or how many postings are still to download.

What it does not do yet

Every transaction records who made it, and that name travels into the app and into every export — so a set of books is always attributable.

It posts adjustments, not day-to-day entries. Working papers create journals in your books. Recording sales, expenses and invoices stays in the web app — this is a month-end tool, not a till.

Coming next:

• More working papers — depreciation schedules and fixed-asset registers, on the same round trip.
• Firm view for accountants managing several clients.
• macOS and Linux builds.

Installing

1. Download the installer above.
2. Run it. Windows SmartScreen may warn about a new publisher — choose More info → Run anyway.
3. Sign in with the same email and password you use on the SBB website.
4. Your books download once. After that the app opens instantly, connection or not.

New versions install over the old one and keep your settings.

Troubleshooting

"Sign-in failed" or "Your books can't be opened." Versions before 0.1.7 had faults that stopped the app working — download again from the link above and reinstall. The reinstall clears anything an earlier version left behind.

If you are on 0.1.7 or later and still cannot open your books, Windows could not provide secure storage for the encryption key. Sign in to Windows with your normal account rather than a temporary or guest profile, then reopen the app.

Figures look out of date. Press Sync. If the header shows a number of postings behind, the download has not finished.

"Out of balance" on the overview. The app shows the exact amount rather than hiding it. Contact support with that figure — it means something needs correcting in the books themselves, and the app is telling you instead of presenting a statement you cannot rely on.

Sync fails. Your books stay readable. Check the server address under sign-in and your connection; the app retries automatically every ten minutes.