For accounting firms

If you keep books for other people, the practice workspace runs your whole client portfolio from one screen instead of signing in and out of client accounts all day.

The portfolio view

One dashboard across every client you serve:

• Which books need attention, and how urgently
• Where each client sits in their close cycle
• Review pressure and blockers by client
• Which clients are quiet and which are consuming your week

The stat tiles are clickable — they filter straight to the clients behind the number, so "seven clients need attention" becomes a working list rather than a figure.

Connecting clients

Connect a client links their business to your practice. They approve the connection from their side; you never gain access to a book without its owner agreeing.

You can also hold custodial businesses — books your firm maintains directly on a client's behalf.

Start with one or two clients rather than moving the whole portfolio at once. Choose a client whose day-to-day work will show SBB's strengths — mobile money, a till, or unreliable connectivity — and run one month beside the old system before expanding.

Your first practice and pilot client

Use this order. It keeps access, migration, staff responsibility, and close ownership explicit before the monthly volume arrives.

1. Create the practice

Open Accountant → Set up your practice and enter the name clients know. Pick the closest practice type; it describes the workspace and does not change the books.

Under Settings:

• Confirm the firm display name
• Upload the logo clients should see
• Choose an accent colour
• Choose the reporting currency for portfolio comparisons

2. Add the people who will actually work

Invite staff under Team, then confirm each person's role. Create a custom role only when the built-in ceiling is genuinely too broad or too narrow.

Do not assign everybody to every client. Give the pilot one lead and name supporting staff deliberately; the workload view attributes responsibility to the lead.

3. Choose the pilot

A good first client has:

• A manageable current-year history
• An owner who will answer access and evidence requests promptly
• At least one SBB advantage that is easy to observe, such as mobile money, a till, multi-currency accounts, or unreliable connectivity
• A source trial balance the accountant trusts

Avoid beginning with the firm's messiest or most politically sensitive client. The pilot is proving the workflow, not testing how much chaos the team can absorb.

4. Connect or create the client

Use Connect a client when the owner already has SBB. The owner reads and approves the requested scope in their own account.

Use a custodial business when the firm is setting the books up before the owner has an account. Record the eventual owner's email and complete the claim; custodial status is a setup bridge, not permanent ownership by the firm.

5. Prove the opening numbers

For QuickBooks, export a Trial Balance CSV as at the switch date and use Move from QuickBooks. Resolve every unclassified account, require the debits and credits to tie, and spot-check balances after import.

Then import customers, suppliers, products, transactions, and open invoices or bills in the order described in Migrate to SBB.

6. Prepare the monthly intake

• Upload one real statement and confirm its column mapping
• Save the mapping only after checking the account and date columns
• Preview the repeated categorisation rules the firm needs
• Reconcile at least one bank or mobile-money account to a real statement
• Request one missing document through SBB so both sides understand the hand-off

7. Run one month in parallel

Keep the source system available while the firm completes one full SBB month:

1. Import the activity.
2. Review exceptions and proposals.
3. Clear missing evidence.
4. Reconcile the accounts.
5. Move through accountant review, senior review, and client approval.
6. Generate the branded report pack.
7. Compare the closing trial balance and key reports with the source system.

8. Decide with evidence

Move the next clients only when:

• Opening and closing trial balances agree
• The owner understands access and revocation
• Staff know where Today, review, reconciliation, and close live
• The report pack contains what the firm promised to deliver
• The team can name what remained manual

If those conditions do not hold, fix the pilot workflow before adding volume.

The Today queue

The workspace opens on Today, not a directory of client names. It combines:

• Work assigned to you
• Overdue work
• Transactions and proposals waiting for review
• Evidence still awaited from clients
• Open reconciliations
• Unusual activity worth inspecting
• Close sign-offs waiting for you

If one client accounts for an item, the tile opens that client at the relevant work. If several clients are involved, it opens the filtered portfolio.

For paging, full-portfolio totals, partial failures, safe client switching, and the Activity trail, follow Running the practice command centre.

Statements and categorisation rules

Under Clients, add up to 40 CSV or Excel statements in one batch. Each file is assigned to its own client and account; SBB does not guess when a client has several possible bank accounts or wallets.

Confirmed column mappings can be remembered for the firm and overridden for a particular client. Files with a known mapping can proceed without making the team repeat the same setup every month.

Use categorisation rules for repeated work. A rule can match text, amount, direction, money-location type, and mobile-money provider. Preview is mandatory before save, so the firm sees what a rule would touch. A rule will not silently replace a category a person already chose.

For a one-off clean-up, select several transactions and bulk categorise them. Where the staff member cannot apply the change directly, SBB creates reviewable proposals instead.

Assigning work

Assign clients to staff so ownership is explicit, and see load across the team. Unassigned clients are the ones that get forgotten in a busy month.

The Workload view attributes open work to the client's lead. Supporting staff remain visible as “also on”, while clients with no lead are called out instead of being assigned to whichever name happened to come first.

Partners can also define custom practice roles. The role is the maximum a staff member can ever do; the client's delegated scope and the staff assignment can narrow it further.

The close cycle

The practice workspace runs a review path with real stages:

Open → accountant review → senior review → client approval → closed

Each stage carries a note. Firms requiring a second pair of eyes get senior review as a genuine gate rather than an honour system, and every sign-off is attributed.

Reopening a closed period requires authorisation and a reason.

The portfolio deadline view uses the close day your firm sets for each client. It does not invent statutory filing dates. A passed target is only shown as slipped while that period remains unfinished.

Reconciliation

An assigned accountant can reconcile a delegated bank or mobile-money account:

1. Open the client and choose Reconcile.
2. Select the money location.
3. Enter the statement or telco closing balance and date.
4. Match the activity and investigate the remaining difference.
5. If an adjustment is required, it follows the client's journal permission and the firm's review controls.

Recording a statement balance and posting an adjustment are separate powers. Permission to inspect a difference is not permission to book it away.

Report packs

Report pack templates define what a client's monthly pack contains once. Then:

• Generate a pack for one client
• Generate portfolio packs for many clients at once
• Produce a consolidated pack across a client group — for a client running several related businesses

Packs render as PDFs carrying your firm's branding.

See the complete Practice report packs guide and download the fictional sample PDF before designing the firm's delivery process.

Use portfolio packs to generate the same period and template for several clients. Use a client group when related businesses need one consolidated view. Currency conversion and the clients included in the total are disclosed; the interface does not present a partial portfolio as the whole one.

Firm identity

Under settings, configure your client-facing identity: firm display name, logo, and accent colour. Packs and client-facing surfaces carry your brand, not ours.

Also set your reporting currency — the one your portfolio insights and consolidated packs total in. Clients may trade in several currencies; your practice reports in one.

Portfolio insights

Aggregate figures across the portfolio — money in, money out, net, and the movement against the prior period — with each client's contribution visible. Useful for spotting a client whose business is turning before they mention it.

Anomaly detection

Books are scanned for things worth a human look: unusual movements, entries out of pattern, gaps in evidence. It is a prioritisation aid — it tells you which of forty client books to open first, which is the actual scarce resource in a practice.

A consistent chart of accounts

Create a practice COA template when the firm wants new client books to use a consistent structure. Preview shows what would be created or matched before the template is applied. Applying a template to one client does not rewrite the charts of existing clients.

Practice billing

The practice workspace is free to create. A client's business subscription can remain client-paid, or the firm can ask to manage it:

1. The practice requests billing responsibility.
2. The business owner approves or declines.
3. Once approved, the firm sees its rate, paid-through date, invoices, and what will fall due next.
4. The client sees which firm manages the plan, but never the firm's wholesale terms.
5. The firm can hand billing back. If the engagement ends while a firm-paid period remains, the release process records what happens to that value.

Access and billing are deliberately separate. A client may keep the firm as its accountant while paying for itself, and ending payment does not silently delete the books.

Moving a client from QuickBooks

The dedicated Move from QuickBooks workspace accepts a QuickBooks Trial Balance CSV. It proposes account classes, blocks accounts it cannot classify, shows the source debits and credits beside what SBB would import, and refuses to write unless the figures tie.

After import, spot-check the balances while the migration is still being verified. The opening migration can be undone as one unit provided later work has not made that rollback unsafe. Use the ordinary import tools for customers, suppliers, products, transactions, and open invoices or bills.

See Migrate to SBB for the complete order and pilot checklist.

Ending an engagement

The business owner can revoke delegated access immediately. The client's data does not move or disappear, and the activity trail retains the history of the grant and revocation. Deal with billing separately: hand it back or complete the recorded release process rather than using access removal as a billing action.

Related

• Month-end close · Collaboration & roles · Working with your accountant — the client's view · Practice command centre · Practice report packs · Reports · Migration · Reconciliation