Getting Started with PrepIQ

PrepIQ is live on the IQ Suite practice plans, Practice Essential and above. If your account is on one of those, open PrepIQ and you are in. There is nothing to request and nothing to install.

PrepIQ works inside the working-papers template your practice already uses, so what comes back carries your layout, your sheet order, your labels and the conventions your reviewers expect. Upload it once and it becomes the shape of every set you run.

If you would rather see it work before you commit your own file, there is a default template to run against. It is a reasonable set, but the point of PrepIQ is that the output looks like your firm's work rather than ours, so swap yours in before you judge it properly.

Sole trader or limited company. This is not a cosmetic choice: it selects the template and the rules, and both the accounting and the tax treatment follow from it.

A general ledger or bookkeeping export from whatever platform the client is kept on: Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Pandle, or any GL as CSV or Excel. The trial balance alongside it.

The ledger matters as much as the trial balance. A trial balance is a set of closing totals; the ledger is what lets a figure be traced to the postings underneath it rather than accepted as a number.

Anything that answers a question a reviewer would otherwise raise. Scanned, photographed and handwritten documents are all read.

• Bank — statements or closing certificates for every account.
• Finance agreements — hire purchase, loans, mortgage interest certificates, completion statements. Each one gets its own reconciliation sheet.
• Assets — invoices behind anything capitalised, and anything disposed of during the year.
• Stock — the count and valuation at the year end.
• Debtors and creditors — the aged listings at the year end.
• VAT and payroll — the returns for the year, and the payroll year end.
• Invoices and receipts — sales and purchase documents for anything unusual.
• Prior-year working papers — for a continuing client. See carry-forward below.

The client's own emails explaining the odd items are evidence like anything else, and are read as such. If you have a note saying the March payments to a named individual were subcontract labour rather than wages, send it. That is one fewer query coming back to you.

You can also add a plain note at the point of upload for anything RiQ should know that is not in a document.

The heart of the set, and where everything else lands.

• Opening balances, recorded, unrecorded and adjustment columns, all footing and balancing.
• Recorded postings linked from the working sheets rather than typed in.
• Unrecorded entries for what the books never held, depreciation being the obvious one.
• Adjustments for corrections to what was recorded.
• Profit carried through to the balance sheet, with the check netting to zero.

Where a treatment needs your call or the client's confirmation, it is marked TBC and raised as a query with a cell note, never silently decided. Those queries are also drafted into a client email you can send as it stands or edit first.

• Every posted figure is a live cell link to the working sheet it came from, so any number on the trial balance traces to its source in one click. Nothing is a typed-in figure you have to take on trust.
• Nothing is plugged. The recorded columns self-balance by double entry and the profit ties through to capital. The set does not finish with a difference left unexplained.
• Rec marks appear on the lines genuinely supported by a schedule, and are used sparingly so the mark means something.
• A written log accompanies the workbook recording every posting, assumption, judgement and query, so your review starts from a trail rather than a blank file.
• It is recalculated end to end before it reaches you, so there are no broken references or stale figures waiting in the print.

Anything you want done differently goes back through Ask RiQ in plain English. It reworks the same set with the full context of what it already did, rather than starting again.

You can also add documents you forgot at this stage. If the stock sheet turns up late, send it and the set is reworked around it.

When the file is right, you approve it and download the finished set, along with the client query email if you need it. Nothing is released until you do.

The papers are prepared for your review and your sign-off. They are not filed on your behalf, and no judgement in them is presented as final until you have made it.

• Opening balances — last year's closing balance sheet becomes this year's opening balances, proven to tie exactly. The profit and loss starts at nil, as it should.
• Schedules — fixed asset, capital allowance and finance schedules carry their brought-forward figures, so depreciation and the pools pick up where they left off rather than being rebuilt from scratch.
• Your conventions — because it works from your prior file, your layout, labels and presentation are preserved from year to year.

Without a prior file it treats the client as new and opens at nil, which is the right behaviour for a first period but not for a continuing one. It is worth finding last year's file.

PrepIQ works from a ledger. The cleaner that ledger is when it arrives, the less of the set comes back queried, which is where the rest of the suite earns its place.

• CodeIQ codes the year's transactions, matches the invoices and posts back reconciled. That is the ledger PrepIQ then works from.
• ReconcileIQ proves the bank against the books first, because a clean reconciliation is where a clean set of accounts begins.
• LedgerIQ takes the same ledger the other way, into the trend and ratio work you would take to a client meeting.