IQ Books Guides
There are 43 guides covering IQ Books, one for each part of the ledger. They live inside the app itself, so a guide opens beside the screen it describes rather than in a manual you read separately. Pick one below and it opens straight to that page. You will need to be signed in; if you are not, sign in first and then open Guides from the menu.
New here?
Start with the setup wizard, then opening balances if you are bringing an existing business across. If you would rather try it on a full set of books first, the quick start explains the demo company and the download pack that goes with it.
Setup & configuration12 guides
Getting started: setup wizard
Pick your entity type, accounting basis, VAT scheme and chart of accounts. The choices made here shape every report and journal that follows, so it is worth getting right on day one.
Open guide →Setting opening balances
When you migrate to IQ Books mid-year, opening balances tell the ledger what each account stood at on day one. The workflow generates a single dated journal that the rest of your books posts against.
Open guide →Designing your chart of accounts
Your chart of accounts is the spine of every report. IQ Books anchors system behaviour to account roles, not codes, so understanding roles is the difference between books that just work and books that fight you.
Open guide →Working in multiple currencies
IQ Books has one base currency per organisation but can record invoices, bills and bank accounts in any currency. Exchange rates capture the conversion at posting time; settlement and period-end revaluation handle FX differences.
Open guide →Inviting your team and choosing roles
Bring a colleague, bookkeeper or your accountant into an organisation, and use the owner, admin, bookkeeper and viewer roles to control exactly what each person can see and change.
Open guide →Running more than one organisation
IQ Books keeps a completely separate set of books for every business you run. This guide covers adding organisations, how many your plan allows, buying more room, moving books in from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, and undoing a migration if it goes wrong.
Open guide →Moving your books from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage
Bring your opening position across from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage in one click — the opening trial balance, outstanding invoices and bills, and your bank accounts — then check it ties, and undo it cleanly if anything is wrong.
Open guide →Importing customers, suppliers and invoices from a spreadsheet
Bring your existing customer list, supplier list and outstanding sales invoices and bills into IQ Books from a spreadsheet, with a preview that checks every row before anything is saved.
Open guide →Using RiQ: chat and voice
RiQ is the voice copilot inside IQ Books: hold the Space bar, say what you want in plain English, and it does the bookkeeping — previewing every change on a confirm card before anything touches your ledger.
Open guide →Credits and billing: what costs what
A plain-English guide to what IQ Books includes free, what needs a paid plan, and exactly which actions draw on your credits — so nothing on your bill is ever a surprise.
Open guide →Working as a practice across client books
How a practice or bookkeeping firm works across many clients’ organisations in IQ Books — the admin-not-owner access model, inviting your own team with the right roles, and moving a new client’s books over from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage (then checking, or safely undoing, the result).
Open guide →Attachments and searching your books
How to attach receipts, bills, PDFs and photos to your records in IQ Books and keep them safe, plus how to find any transaction, contact or document fast with global search and the ledger filters.
Open guide →Customers & sales5 guides
Managing your customers
A customer is more than a name on an invoice: they carry default payment terms, currency, statement-email cadence, and a complete history of every document and payment. This is where you set them up and keep them tidy.
Open guide →The full sales-invoice lifecycle
From draft to issued to paid: every stage of a sales invoice in IQ Books, including how lines, VAT codes and payment allocation interact with the underlying journal.
Open guide →Quotes, credit notes and refunds
Everything that flows through the sales side that is not a straight invoice: quotes, sales credit notes, refunds processed against original payments. Each has a defined effect on the ledger.
Open guide →Recording customer receipts
A customer pays you. The receipt records the inflow and decides which invoices it clears. Allocations are the difference between books that show real-time AR and books that just total payments.
Open guide →Sending customer and supplier statements
Produce a statement of account for any customer or supplier — opening balance, the invoices, credit notes and payments in between, a running balance and a closing balance — email it to a customer, and tie the totals back to your ledger with aged debtors and creditors.
Open guide →Suppliers & purchases5 guides
Adding suppliers and recording bills
The purchase-side mirror of customers and invoices: the parties you owe and the documents they send you. Supplier bills are the foundation of accurate aged creditors and accurate cost reporting.
Open guide →Receipt capture: OCR-driven bill entry
Drop any number of receipt photos or PDFs into the queue. CodeIQ extracts supplier, amounts, VAT and dates; you review each one side-by-side with the original document, then save — the draft bill keeps the scan attached.
Open guide →Purchase orders: approving spend before the bill
Create, approve, send and convert purchase orders without confusing a commercial commitment with a ledger transaction.
Open guide →Employee expenses: claims, approval and reimbursement
Collect receipts and mileage, approve the accounting, and reimburse employees without turning staff into suppliers.
Open guide →Paying suppliers and aged creditors
Recording the payment, allocating it against bills, and reading the aged-creditors report. Symmetrical with customer receipts but worth its own guide because the allocation table is where most accounting errors hide.
Open guide →Banking6 guides
Setting up bank accounts and reading the cashbook
Linking a bank account to your ledger, picking the right currency, the cashbook view, and what changes when you import transactions vs. posting manually.
Open guide →Importing a bank CSV and confirming drafts
CSV import puts every bank line into a draft state; confirming each one decides what kind of journal it produces. Three confirm paths handle every realistic scenario.
Open guide →Bank rules: auto-categorising recurring transactions
Match by description and amount, set the category and VAT, save once and every future draft that matches gets pre-coded. The fastest path to a tidy bank import for predictable recurring transactions.
Open guide →Coding your bank with CodeIQ
A click-once enrichment that uses CodeIQ to suggest a category, VAT code, and contact for every unconfirmed draft. The fastest path through a large CSV when bank rules cannot cover everything.
Open guide →Recording transfers between your accounts
How to record money moving between two of your own bank accounts: bring in both sides, let CodeIQ pair them, and confirm the transfer as one journal with no profit-and-loss impact and no VAT.
Open guide →Reconciling a bank account to your statement
Use the Reconcile tab to check your bank statement against your ledger line by line, then fix any drift, duplicates or missing entries without ever breaking your double-entry.
Open guide →Ledger & adjustments6 guides
Posting manual journals and corrections
Adjustments, accruals, prepayments, year-end reclassifications. The Adjustments workspace is where you bypass the pre-built workflows and post directly. Immutability rules dictate how you correct mistakes.
Open guide →Fixed assets and monthly depreciation
Capitalise an asset, set its depreciation method, and IQ Books posts the monthly journals automatically. Disposal handles the gain or loss on sale. The asset register is the lighter touch on what would otherwise be a manual chore.
Open guide →Prepayments & accruals: schedules that keep the books right monthly
Spread an annual cost over the months it covers, defer income you have invoiced ahead of earning, and post month-end accruals that reverse themselves. Set the schedule once; the engine posts every month end.
Open guide →Projects: tagging revenue and costs
Some businesses run on projects: contracts, jobs, campaigns, properties. Project tags on journal lines give you a P&L per project without disrupting the chart of accounts.
Open guide →Project time, billables and WIP
Set task rates, record time and costs, understand WIP and profitability, then create traceable draft project invoices.
Open guide →Recurring invoices and journals
Templates for invoices, bills and journals that fire on a schedule. The recurring sweep runs every hour and emits any documents due. Pair with auto-email and your monthly subscriptions handle themselves.
Open guide →Products & stock1 guide
Reports & closing4 guides
Reading the reports and closing the year
A guided tour of every report in the suite, what each one tells you, when to use which. Plus the year-end close workflow that walks through the standard period-end checklist.
Open guide →Budgets: planning and variance without changing the books
Build monthly account or project plans, import scenarios, apply formulas, and compare them with accrual or cash actuals.
Open guide →Deeper analysis with LedgerIQ
LedgerIQ turns your IQ Books ledger into around forty analytics modules — statements, ratios, trends and forecasts — unlocked for a flat 1,000 credits per analysis period. This guide shows you how to open it, scope a period, and export the single-sheet general ledger for a year-end handoff.
Open guide →The audit trail: who changed what, and when
IQ Books keeps a permanent, read-only history of every change to your books — who made it, what changed and when. This guide shows you how to read and filter the audit log, why corrections are never deleted in place, and how to safely undo everything from a single recategorisation to a whole migration.
Open guide →Tax & filing4 guides
Statutory accounts and filing
Prepare FRS 105 or FRS 102 Section 1A statutory accounts straight from the ledger — balance sheet, notes and disclosures generated for you. A six-step gated workflow walks Setup → Map → Review → Approve → Tag → File, tagging every figure as validated iXBRL before it goes to Companies House.
Open guide →VAT and Making Tax Digital
The full UK VAT picture: the ten VAT codes including reverse charge, domestic reverse charge and postponed import VAT; the live nine-box VAT return drillable to the journals behind it; and the MTD submission workflow. Plus MTD for Income Tax (ITSA) quarterly updates for sole traders.
Open guide →Construction Industry Scheme
A complete CIS tax-month workflow for contractors and subcontractors: verification, labour and materials, net payments and receipts, CIS300, statements sent and deductions suffered.
Open guide →MTD for Income Tax (ITSA) for sole traders
How a sole trader sets up Making Tax Digital for Income Tax in IQ Books, files the cumulative quarterly updates that HMRC now requires, and completes the legally binding year-end final declaration.
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