Your firm, every client's books, and the client, in one system

Where the firm stands, every morning.

One screen for the whole practice. The firm-wide counts sit up top, then every open period placed on a close-stage strip, the state of each client's portal, and a feed of what your team did last.

• Four firm-wide counts: active engagements, periods closing this week, overdue tasks, and businesses on the roster
• Period close health: every open period sorted into bookkeeper work, supervisor review, ready to lock, reconciliation, client review, or locked
• Customer portals at a glance: active, invited, and disabled
• Recent activity across the firm, with a link through to the full audit log
• A ten-step getting-started walkthrough on sample data you can remove with one click

Define the process once. Every engagement runs on it.

A workflow template is your firm's standard run of stages and tasks: who does what, in what order, at what cadence. ZiePieBooks ships eight system templates for Monthly and Catch-up work, with or without a supervisor and a customer in the loop. Duplicate one, adjust it, and every engagement you start from it follows your way of working.

• Stages and tasks, each with an owner seat: bookkeeper, reviewer, approver, or client
• Monthly and Catch-up variants; tasks that recur every period or run once at setup
• Tasks conditional on how statements arrive: bank feed, CSV, PDF, or by email
• Duplicate a system template and edit your own; set the firm's default
• Preview the full task list before an engagement is activated

People, and the books you keep for them.

A customer is a person: you invite them, they get a portal login under your firm's roof, and you can disable that access at any time. A business is one set of books: it belongs to a customer, holds its own bank accounts and chart of accounts, and is what an engagement runs on. One customer can own several businesses, and a customer only ever sees their own.

• Invite customers by email with a one-link activation; resend, revoke, enable or disable, singly or in bulk
• Businesses by industry, each with its owner, engagements and portal status on one list
• Archive a business and its licence is released; unarchive brings it back
• A customer's access is scoped to their own businesses, never widened by a role change
• Client tax IDs, phone numbers and internal notes are encrypted at rest

One approved standard per industry.

Your firm's chart of accounts, held once per industry. Every business you onboard starts from the template for its industry, so coding stays consistent across clients and the AI learns from the same account names. Adjust a template, apply it, add accounts to a business when it needs them, and capture opening balances when the books begin.

• A template per industry: retail, hospitality, professional services, construction and more
• Start from a template or blank; import accounts from a file
• Apply a template to a business, then add, archive, reactivate or retype its accounts
• Opening balances captured per business as a setup task
• Quick-add an account while categorising, without leaving staging

Onboarding happens in the portal, not over email.

A new client gets one link. They verify their email, fill in the intake form for each business, including every bank account and how its statements will arrive, and submit. Your firm reviews and approves, then prices the engagement in a proposal the client reads, questions and signs in the same place.

• Intake form per business: entity details, the work needed, accounts and statement delivery
• Firm-side review: approve with a workflow template, or return it with a note
• Proposal with line items, scope on both sides, and an optional deposit
• A conversation thread on the proposal for questions and revisions
• The client signs by typing their name; the engagement activates off the signed proposal

Statements uploaded by the client, straight into the pipeline.

When a feed is not an option, the client uploads the statement. A PDF is kept and read for its balances; a CSV is imported into staging. Each file shows where it is in the pipeline, and a duplicate for a period already covered is refused.

• Upload PDF or CSV statements against a named account and period
• Status per file: accepted, ready to import, processing, processed
• Upload directly from the month's task on the period board
• Duplicate statements for a covered period are rejected
• Every upload records who sent it and when, and who reviewed it

Each month, signed by name.

The client's months page shows where every period stands: not started, with the bookkeeper, waiting for them, or closed. When a month is ready they review it and sign by typing their full name, and the signature records the name, the date and where it was signed from. Reports for the business are theirs to read in the same portal.

• A card per month with its status and the client's own task count
• Sign-off by typed full name, checked against the client's name on file
• Journal entries that need the client's approval, in their own queue
• Reports for the business, readable in the portal
• Notifications in the portal and by email when something waits on them