The twelve businesses you can practise on

ByteBook ships with twelve practice businesses. Each one is a real shape of New Zealand business, and each one already has months of trading in its books: invoices sent and partly paid, bills to pay, a bank statement coded line by line, GST returns worked out, and reports ready to read.

Business	Trade	What it is there to teach
Bright Cuts	Hairdressing	Not registered for GST, so no GST appears on any document and none is claimed back
Kōwhai Advisory	Consulting	GST on the payments basis: the same invoice changes periods depending on when the money arrives
Tasman Builders Ltd	Construction	Stage payments against one contract, so one job produces several invoices over months
Harbour Cafe & Co	Hospitality	Daily takings banked in a lump, so the money in the bank is not the money rung up
Loom & Light	Online retail	Refunds and reversals: a credit is not a deleted sale, and the record shows both
Marine Parade Rentals	Residential property	Rent is exempt, so there is income with no GST and costs whose GST cannot be claimed
Whirinaki Contracting	Horticulture	A six-monthly GST period, so one return covers a lot of trading
Foundry Labs	Software	A year of costs and no income: the loss and its funding are the story
Marine Parade Dental	Health	Roles, an accountant who may look but not touch, and an access log
Ngata Plumbing Ltd	Trades	A busy bank statement with lines of every kind, and two payments that look identical
Pacific Trading Ltd	Wholesale	Importing stock, selling it here, and a balance date that is not 31 March
Precision Engineering Ltd	Engineering	Amounts built to break careless rounding: odd quantities, long prices, a cent that will not sit still

Open one

1. In the sidebar, under Set up, choose Practice businesses.
2. Read what each business is there to teach. Under What to try there are four things worth doing in that business.
3. Press Start this business. ByteBook closes and opens again on that business's books, and a line at the top of every page says which business you are in.

Your own books are never touched. A practice business is a copy kept beside them, and the line at the top of the page is how you always know which set you are looking at.

Come back, or start again

• Back to my books. The line at the top of every page has this button. It closes the practice business and opens your own books again.
• Continue. If you have already worked in a business, the button says Continue and it picks up where you left off. Work you do in a practice business is kept.
• Start over. This puts the business back exactly as it was, ready for the next person. You cannot start over the business you are currently in — open another one, or your own books, first.
• Save a copy of these books. Downloads the practice business as an ordinary ByteBook file, which you can open from **Practice businesses → Open your own books from a file**.

What is already true of all twelve

Every one of these businesses is complete and internally consistent. Before they shipped, each was traded through the real application and then checked from the raw rows:

• every entry balances, so money in equals money out;
• every invoice's lines add up to its total;
• the GST in the return equals the GST in the ledger;
• the balance sheet balances;
• nothing is stored off the cent;
• a voided entry cancels itself out;
• the fingerprint chain has no breaks;
• the assurance programme reports no exceptions (it may still carry notes for information).

That last point can sound odd in a training business. It is deliberate. What is waiting in these books is the ordinary work of a business — invoices past their due date, a bill still to pay, a draft invoice to finish, a bank reconciliation to check — not a planted mistake. Your job is to do the work and read the evidence, not to hunt for something the program has hidden.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A rule that is easy to state is often hard to apply. Inventory is measured at the lower of cost and net realisable value NZ IAS 2.9 is one sentence. Knowing when a selling price has fallen far enough that the book value has to come down is a judgement, and judgement needs practice on something that behaves like a real business.

The awkward cases are in these books on purpose:

• a customer who pays late, so the aged debtors report has something in it;
• two identical-looking payments to the same supplier, which you have to check are genuinely two payments (A03 lists identical lines for you to check, and A08 looks for the same amount described the same way twice in a week);
• a manual journal, which an auditor will ask about;
• a bank statement that has to be reconciled, with a closing balance that has to come from the statement rather than from the ledger;
• a period that can be sealed, and then checked again later.

Choosing where to start

If you are new to bookkeeping, start with Kōwhai Advisory (consulting). It is a small business with ordinary transactions and one late payment.

If you are here for the audit side, start with Ngata Plumbing Ltd (trades). A busy bank statement produces more coding decisions, more places to make a mistake, and a more interesting reconciliation.

If you are teaching, use Precision Engineering Ltd last. It is built from the amounts that break careless rounding, and it shows why money has to be kept in whole cents: a cent cannot go missing when amounts are added.