Start here
Set up a training business
Install ByteBook, answer four questions, and give yourself a role you can hand over.
Install it
On a Mac, open the ByteBook disk image and drag ByteBook into Applications. That is the whole install. The program carries everything it needs, so it works on a computer with nothing else on it and with the internet switched off.
On Windows, run the installer and follow it. It installs for your own user account, so it does not need an administrator password, and it leaves a ByteBook shortcut in the Start menu. The Windows build is an unsigned beta, so Windows may warn you the first time; the download page publishes a SHA-256 checksum you can check the file against.
On a Mac the application is signed with ByteMind's Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so there is nothing to click through: it opens on a Mac that has never seen it, with the internet switched off.
Answer four short questions
The first time ByteBook opens, it runs four short steps and then leaves you alone. You can change any answer later in Settings.
- Your business. Its name and contact details, which print on every document. Use a pretend name for training — keeping the practice business separate from a real one matters more than it sounds.
- GST and your balance date. Whether you are registered for GST, how often you file, whether you are on the invoice basis or the payments basis, and the date your financial year ends. These decide whether GST appears on a document and which return period a transaction falls in.
- How you invoice. The prefix for invoice numbers and how many days a customer has to pay. (The note at the foot of an invoice is set later under Settings → Invoices.)
- You are ready. A short checklist, and the button that opens the books.
Learning to find and correct one of these settings is part of the exercise: they all live under Settings afterwards.
Practice on a business that already exists
Setting up a business from nothing teaches you the setting up. It does not teach you what it is like to open somebody's books in the middle of a year, which is the situation most of this handbook is really about.
Practice businesses — in the sidebar under Set up — are twelve New Zealand businesses with months of trading already in their books. Each one is a different trade, and each trade brings its own kind of question:
| Business | Trade | What it is there to teach |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Cuts | Hairdressing | A business below the GST threshold, with no tax on anything |
| Kōwhai Advisory | Consulting | GST on the payments basis, where the tax follows the money |
| Tasman Builders Ltd | Construction | Stage payments over months, where ageing matters more than the total |
| Harbour Cafe & Co | Hospitality | Daily takings banked in a lump, and the difference somebody has to explain |
| Loom & Light | Online retail | Refunds and reversals, which are not negative sales |
| Marine Parade Rentals | Residential property | Exempt rent, and repairs you cannot claim GST on |
| Whirinaki Contracting | Horticulture | Seasonal work on a six-monthly GST period |
| Foundry Labs | Software | A year of costs and no income, funded by somebody else |
| Marine Parade Dental | Health | Staff, an accountant who may look but not touch, and an access log |
| Ngata Plumbing Ltd | Trades | A busy bank statement, with two payments that look identical |
| Pacific Trading Ltd | Wholesale | Imports, and a balance date that is not 31 March |
| Precision Engineering Ltd | Engineering | Amounts that break careless rounding, to the cent |
Press Start this business and ByteBook opens that business's books. A line at the top of every page says which business you are in, and it carries Back to my books so you can always get back. The practice business is a copy kept beside your own books, so nothing you do in it can touch them. Work you do there is kept; Start over puts the business back the way it was.
A practice business lives in a folder called training beside your own books. On a Mac that is ~/Library/Application Support/ByteBook/training/, and on Windows it is %APPDATA%\ByteBook\training\. Each business is one file, so copying its folder is a complete backup of it.
Every one of these businesses is complete and internally consistent: open the audit trail on any of them and the chain verifies, and the assurance programme reports no exceptions. (It may show a note for information — a bank statement balance saved with the business, for instance, can be older than the books.) What is waiting in them is the ordinary work of a business — invoices past their due date, an unpaid bill, a draft to finish, a reconciliation to check — and What to try on each one is a place to start.
Give yourself a role
By default ByteBook opens without a password, which is right for a computer only one person uses. For training it is better to switch security on, because the roles are part of what you are here to learn:
| Role | May do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including settings, backups and who can sign in |
| General manager | Run the books: invoices, bills, bank, GST, reports |
| Accountant | Read everything, including the tax working papers; change nothing |
| Auditor | Read the books and the assurance work, change nothing |
Turn on Settings → Security, set your own password first, then add the other roles. ByteBook will not switch anyone else's access on until the owner has a password, so a login cannot be handed out that locks the owner out.
The distinction between reading and changing is the point. An auditor who cannot change the books is not a technical detail; it is the arrangement that makes the audit worth anything.
The assistant, if you switch it on
The assistant is off by default, and while it is off ByteBook never contacts anyone. Settings → Assistant switches it on: choose a provider, add an API key, and press Test connection, which sends one tiny request and nothing from your books.
The key is kept outside your books, in the operating system's secure store where there is one, so a backup of the books does not carry the key with it. If a key looks incomplete after you paste it, ByteBook tells you on the same page instead of failing quietly later — paste the whole key and save again.
What a request sends is limited to what the question needs: account names and balances, plus customer names only when you ask it to draft an invoice. Bank account numbers and contact details are not sent. With a local model (Ollama), nothing leaves the computer at all.
The assistant explains and drafts; it does not post entries. Every figure it quotes comes from the page you were looking at, so it can be checked there.
Know where the books are
The whole bookkeeping record is one file. On a Mac it lives in ~/Library/Application Support/ByteBook/; on Windows it lives in %APPDATA%\ByteBook\. Beside it is a backups folder that keeps the last thirty copies.
That single file is worth understanding before you start. Backing up a set of books is copying one file. Moving them to another computer is copying one file. Nothing in it is locked to ByteBook, although reading it without the program needs a database viewer. It also means the fingerprint chain described in chapter 12 has something to protect: the record is a file on a disk, and the chain is what tells you whether anyone has edited it.
Your first walk-through
Before you change anything, look at the main areas of the screen. In ByteBook's sidebar they are grouped by what they are for:
Everyday — Overview, Invoices, Bills to pay, Bank & coding, Transactions, Timesheets. This is where the business happens.
Understand — Reports, GST, Assistant, Audit trail, Assurance, The chain. This is where you read what the business did.
Set up — Customers & suppliers, Chart of accounts, Recurring, Practice businesses, Settings, Help. This is where you configure it.