What Backline Books is (and how it thinks)
Books is a double-entry ledger with an automation layer on top. Understanding that order — ledger first, automation second — explains almost every design decision in the product.
ConceptFor Business owners, Bookkeepers, Firm staff
The shape of the product
Backline Books is a double-entry accounting system. Every number you see anywhere in the product — on a dashboard tile, in a report, on a client's portal — is a projection over one immutable journal. Nothing is stored twice, and no screen keeps its own private running total that can quietly disagree with the ledger.
On top of that ledger sits an automation layer: document intake that reads bills and invoices, a categorizer that proposes coding for bank activity, a reconciler that proposes matches, and a conversational coworker that can carry out real operations. That layer proposes. It does not silently post. Anything the machine could not complete safely lands in a queue with a human's name on it.
Three surfaces, one set of books
The same organization is visible through three different front doors, and which one you use depends on your job, not on your data. There is only ever one ledger underneath.
| Surface | Who uses it | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| The workspace | Owners, bookkeepers, controllers | The full accounting console — ledger, banking, payables, receivables, reports, payroll, close. |
| The firm console | Accounting firm staff | A cross-client view: work queues, client list, engagements, and firm-level operations. |
| The client portal | Business owners being served by a firm | A read-focused view of their own numbers, documents, and open requests. |
A firm bookkeeper and the client they serve can look at the same invoice at the same moment and see the same balance, because they are looking at the same record rather than at two copies that sync on a schedule.
Organizations, legal entities, and scope
An organization is the account. Inside it are one or more legal entities — the things that actually file tax returns and own bank accounts. Every journal entry, bill, invoice, and bank account belongs to exactly one legal entity.
The entity switcher in the header sets your scope. Pick a single entity to work in its books, or pick Consolidated to see every entity in the organization combined. Scope follows you: it is carried in the page URL as an `entity` parameter, so a link you paste into a message opens for your colleague in the same scope you were in.
Vocabulary worth learning early
These terms appear constantly in the interface. Learning them now saves a lot of squinting later.
- Posting
- Writing a balanced entry into the journal. Once posted, an entry is never edited in place — it is reversed and re-entered, so history stays intact.
- Scope
- The entity or set of entities you are currently working in, set by the entity switcher and reflected in the URL.
- Approval
- A human review step for something a person prepared: a bill, an invoice, a journal entry. Lives in the Approvals queue.
- Exception
- A machine-originated event that could not safely post — a missing account, an ambiguous match, a locked period. Lives in the Exceptions queue.
- Provenance
- The record of where a transaction came from: uploaded document, bank feed, API call, manual entry, or AI proposal. Shown in the Source column on list screens.
- Period lock
- A closed accounting period. Posting into a locked period is refused rather than silently allowed.
Common questions
A replacement. Books keeps its own ledger and is the system of record for the entities you run in it. There is an import path for bringing existing books over, and a QuickBooks connection used during migration, but the intent is that Books holds the books.
Yes. Add each company as a legal entity inside the organization. They share users, settings, and the chart of accounts structure, while keeping separate ledgers and separate financial statements. Consolidated scope reports across all of them.
It posts only what it can complete safely and deterministically, and every posting it makes is attributed to it in the audit trail and marked in the Source column. Anything ambiguous stops and becomes an exception for a person to resolve.
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