Set up a new book

To get a new business's books going:

1. Go to Ledger › Setup › Guide, a five-step checklist: set up your business, add clients and vendors, import bank statements, send your first invoice, and share a snapshot with your accountant. Each step links straight to where you do it.
2. For a guided walkthrough, use the Set up your books banner's Get started button. It asks whether you're starting fresh or switching from other software, then collects your business type, province, and fiscal year-end.

If you're switching over, the wizard runs five steps, and the recommended route through them starts with one upload:

1. Your year confirms your fiscal year-end, which decides how your trial balance is read.
2. Bring your books across is the step that does the work: upload your adjusted trial balance (PDF, Excel, or CSV) and TALISK_HQ builds your chart of accounts, sets up the bank accounts and cards it finds on the ledger accounts they belong to, and pre-fills your starting balances. Nothing is saved until you review and confirm each part.
3. Opening balances is where you check the figures and post them.
4. Your bank connects a bank feed or points you at statement import.
5. A few things to check is a read-only list to go over with your accountant.

Every step can be skipped. If you don't have a trial balance, use the "set my balances up by hand" link on step 2 and enter the figures yourself: you get to the same place, it just takes longer. Switch from another accounting system walks the switching route in full.

The opening-balances step is where you set your conversion date: this is the most important value to get right, because activity dated before it is treated as history that's already in your opening balances.

Connect your bank after you post your opening balances, not before. Posting them is what tells TALISK_HQ where your history ends. Bank feeds usually reach back a month or three, so some of what arrives will be dated before your start date; TALISK_HQ files those as reference and never posts them twice, because those amounts are already inside your opening balances. Connect a feed first and there's no start date yet to compare against, so that older activity posts as though it were new.

Books are kept in CAD: there's no currency to pick during setup, and a book's currency can't be changed afterwards. Foreign-currency transactions are supported on the documents themselves: a USD or GBP bill carries its own currency and is converted into your CAD books when it posts.

Add each separate business as its own book.