Your business details come first. The person icon at the top opens them: your name and address, your year end, your UTR, VAT number and CIS references, your bank details and your invoice settings - including a letterhead for the invoices you send. It is what lets the app produce a real invoice, and what your returns are filed against.
Say what the business is. In Your business details → Who you are, Business type is a slider: sole trader, LLP or limited company, or a charity - a charitable company, a CIO, or a trust or association. It decides which tax and which accounts the app works out: Self Assessment for a sole trader or partner, Corporation Tax for a company, and a charity's own accounts for a charity. New books start invoice based - accruals, which HMRC calls traditional accounting - and a sole trader, or a partnership whose partners are all individuals, can choose cash based just below it instead. A basis is for a whole tax year, so change it at the start of one - nothing is deleted either way.
Say when your year ends. Every period selector, every quarterly update and every deadline in the app is worked out from it, so it has to be right before anything else. Most sole traders and landlords end on 5 April; a company or a charity ends on the date its accounts are made up to. It is in Your business details → Who you are, and you can change it later - the figures move with it.
The switcher at the top right. It names the entity whose books are open. Keep books for more than one - two charities, say, or a company and a sole trade - and each has books of its own: switch between them there, or add another. An accountancy practice switches between its clients and its Practice Dashboard. Sign out is there too.
Everything saves as you go. Signed in, each change is saved to your Stoneledger account the moment you make it, and earlier versions are kept - there is nothing to back up. Import and export, in Your business details, bring a spreadsheet of entries in and take the books out to Excel or CSV whenever you want a copy.
Starting part way through? Put your opening position in.Add inception data takes the figures your books stood at on the day you start here - what you were owed, what you owed, your bank, stock and equipment. Everything after it is trading; nothing may be dated before it. You only ever do this once.
Coming from other software? Bring the position across.Integrate data is for a set of figures that arrives later - a trial balance from an accountant, or the closing position from the system you are leaving. You can do it as many times as you need, and each one is kept as its own record so you can always see what came from where. Moving from Xero?Move from Xero is inside Integrate data: it brings Xero's balances and every transaction since, line by line - each invoice, bill, payment and journal as the same record here - and checks the trial balance against Xero's. Both buttons are below, and Integrate data is also on the Trial balance screen.
Everything is double entry underneath. Whatever you record - an invoice, a payment, a payslip, a journal - posts to a real general ledger, and the Trial balance screen shows it and checks it against every other screen. Click any figure to open what makes it up, down to the document behind it; right-click it (or press and hold on a phone) and choose Explain this for what the figure is and what is in it, in words.
Nothing goes to HMRC or Companies House without you sending it. The app works out your VAT, your quarterly updates, your CIS returns, your accounts and what to put aside for tax as you go, and shows you the workings first. You review, then you send. Every return, and where it stands, is on the Submission hub.
