Accounting
Accounting overview
A tour of Accounting — turning your bank activity into clean books, one transaction at a time.
Accounting pulls in your bank activity and helps you turn it into clean books. Money in gets filed as income; money out goes on a job or into overhead. Transactions handles what is new, Completed holds everything you have already filed, and Rules is where your categories live and where routine vendors learn to file themselves.
Accounting is open to owners and managers, and to anyone you have given accounting access — including an outside CPA.
Step 1 — Get your money into Accounting
Until CRMb has something to work with, Accounting shows a single card asking you to connect a bank, with Import your history underneath it for a move from QuickBooks or a spreadsheet. Those are the two doors in. Once either one has landed, the full page appears.
Connected, the page reads as three tabs — Transactions, Completed and Rules — with the controls that feed and frame them across the top right:
- Add — hand-enter a transaction for cash or an account you have not connected.
- Import — bring in history from QuickBooks or a spreadsheet (Step 8).
- Sync now — pull the latest from your bank. It only appears once a live bank connection exists.
- Banks — connect, refresh, disconnect, or clear imported history (Step 7).
- The window: Week, Month, Quarter and Year sit together on the right and you land on Month. The Custom pill beside them opens a From and To picker for any range you like; it takes effect as soon as both dates are filled, and the pill then shows the dates instead of the word Custom.
Step 2 — Read the Transactions list
Bank activity lists every transaction in the window that still needs review. Each row is one line of the table: the Date, a Check no. you can type straight into, the Bank description, the Amount, a paperclip for receipts, a bubble for a memo, From / To — the customer on money in, the vendor on money out — Categorize, and Action. Drag a column edge to make it wider, or click Date to flip the sort.
Two buttons sit in Action on every unfiled row: Match, which settles the transaction against a record CRMb already has, such as an open invoice; and Categorize, which files it where the Categorize cell says. The pencil beside them is Step 5.
Nothing is ever quietly left out. If the window holds more transactions than the page will fetch, a warning above the table says so and tells you to narrow the range. Unfiled rows older than the window start are counted in a row that reads "N older to review", with Show all beside it. And the table itself renders in pages: "Showing N of N transactions", with a button to draw the next batch.
Under the table, Payroll to reconcile flags payroll that was marked paid in Punch with no matching payout in the bank yet. Wait for it to post and match it — or, if you paid that person outside the bank, open the row's Record payout… dropdown and pick how: Cash, Check, Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, Direct Deposit (ACH) or Other. The period is reconciled the moment you pick.
Step 3 — Categorize a transaction
Open a row's Categorize cell and pick where it belongs. The list is your own categories in one flat alphabetical run, with No category pinned at the top. An unset cell reads "No category" in amber, so filing something with nothing on it is visible before you press anything.
Some money-out rows arrive with a category already in the cell and a green check beside it — that is CRMb matching what your bank calls the transaction against a category of yours with the same name. Nothing is filed until you press Categorize. The suggestion is there for you to confirm or change.
Once you press it, the row turns green and shows the filed category under the description.
Note — After you file one by hand, CRMb quietly asks whether it should always file that vendor the same way. Add rule makes it a rule; Not now dismisses it. When the suggestion came from your bank's own category rather than the vendor's name, the offer reads Always suggest instead — a mapping fills the box for you to check, it never files on its own.
Step 4 — File several at once
Tick the checkboxes on several rows and a bar appears above the table.
The first button files each checked expense under exactly what its own Categorize cell reads, and the count beside it tells you first how many of them have a category and how many do not. File selected puts every checked expense on one job or into one overhead category instead. The income dropdown beside it files checked deposits under a single income category. Skip marks the lot as not business activity.
Step 5 — More ways to file one transaction
The pencil at the end of a row opens the filing options a plain category cannot cover:
- Job — put the spend on a specific job. With more than one job open you also get Split across jobs…, which divides one charge between several.
- Overhead — file it under a category, or + New category to make one on the spot.
- Payroll — a payroll payout. Where CRMb can see pay periods it might settle, they are listed to pick from.
- Purchase order — settle it against an open PO. This one only appears when you have open purchase orders it could pay.
- Not a business expense — leave it out of your books entirely.
- Move back to review — undo a filing and put the transaction back in the list.
- Add receipt — attach a photo or a PDF. Once something is attached the paperclip in the row opens it, and the menu gains a View receipts entry.
Note — The check number, the memo and the customer or vendor are all edited on the row itself, filed or not: type the check number straight into its cell and tab away, and the memo and the From / To picker open in place on the row. There is no separate details screen on the web; that one belongs to the Mac and iPad apps.
Step 6 — Set up categories and auto-categorize rules
Switch to Rules. Categories on the left is your own chart of accounts, and Auto-categorize rules on the right is where the routine ones stop needing you.
Categories are yours to shape. If you have none yet, Add a starter set gives you ten to begin with — Advertising & Marketing, Vehicles & Fuel, Insurance, Job Supplies, Meals, Office Supplies & Software, Rent & Utilities, Repairs & Maintenance, Subcontractors, and Taxes & Licenses. Type a name in the box to add your own, and use the menu on a chip to merge it into another one.
Each category carries a type — income, expense, equity, asset or liability — set from the small dropdown on the chip itself. Only income and expense reach your profit and loss; equity keeps owner draws and transfers between your own accounts off it. Income categories work the same way as expense ones: you add the ones your business bills under, then set their type to income so they land on the right side.
A rule is a piece of a vendor's name and a category: Vendor contains… plus Category…, then Add rule. New expenses that match go straight to overhead under that category and never reach the review list. There is also a button that runs your rules across every unfiled expense you already have, not only the ones in this window.
Below the rules you may see Category mappings. That is what your bank's own category names mean in your books. A mapping only fills the Categorize box so you can check it — nothing is filed until you press Categorize.
Note — Confirming a payroll match adds a payroll rule here on its own. Future payouts that match a pay period to the cent file themselves from then on.
Step 7 — Connect and manage your banks
Banks in the toolbar holds the connection itself. Connect a bank… adds one. With a live connection you also get Refresh balances, and a Disconnect entry named after the bank — which clears that bank's transactions with it. If you have imported history, Remove imported history… takes that back out separately.
Step 8 — Import transactions
Import opens two doors for history that did not come through a connected bank.
Under Coming from QuickBooks?, export a General Ledger, a Balance Sheet Detail, or a Transaction Detail by Account and upload it exactly as QuickBooks made it — no reshaping. CRMb reads the double-entry sections, picks out your bank accounts, and turns the categories QuickBooks filed each transaction to into CRMb categories. A step called Pick the accounts to import then shows the account sections it found, with your bank accounts already ticked: QuickBooks records every transaction twice, once in the bank account and once mirrored in the category, so importing the bank accounts alone is what keeps nothing counted double.
Keeping records somewhere else? Download the template and fill in one row per transaction. It is a spreadsheet with the five columns CRMb expects — Date, Description, Amount, Category and Type — and a second sheet explaining each one. Then Upload your filled-out file. Any spreadsheet or CSV with a header row works too; the next step matches your columns to CRMb's.
Either way you get a preview of what will land before anything is written.
Note — Re-uploading the same file is safe. Rows that are already in your books are skipped, whether they came from QuickBooks or the template.
Step 9 — Review what's already filed
Switch to Completed for everything that has been filed inside the window, grouped by where it went: Filed expenses, Categorized income, Payroll, Purchases, Recorded deposits, and the skipped rows folded away at the foot. The search box in the card header narrows every group at once, and the window controls at the top of the page work here exactly as they do on Transactions.
Underneath the groups, Operating spend by category and Bank spend on jobs total the window — the first counted in your net margin, the second in each job's.
Every filed row keeps its pencil, so a misfiling is fixed where you find it rather than hunted down somewhere else.