Working with your accountant

Your books are on your hardware. That raises a fair question: how does your CPA see them?

In most desktop accounting the answer is that you send a backup. That answer is worse than people think.

Why not just send a backup

A backup is everything, forever.

Every customer. Every vendor. Every employee record. Every bank detail. Every transaction since you started. All of it, for a question about one quarter.

Once it leaves your office you do not know where it lives. It sits in an email attachment on somebody's server. It gets copied to a laptop. It gets restored onto a workstation at the firm, and it stays there.

You cannot recall it. Nobody will tell you when it is deleted, because nobody is tracking it.

It is also a one-way conversation. They look at a copy of your books from Tuesday. You keep working. By the time they reply, what they reviewed and what you have are already different.

What we do instead

You create a scoped review link. It opens the one thing you want reviewed — a period, a reconciliation, a set of entries. Nothing else.

Your accountant opens it, reviews what is there, marks what they checked, and signs off. You see what they did and when.

Three things matter about it:

It is scoped. They see what you shared. Not the payroll, not the customer list, not last decade.
It expires. Access ends. It does not sit in an inbox for years, quietly becoming a copy of your business nobody remembers.
It is a record. What was reviewed, by whom, and when. That is exactly what you want if the question comes up again.

They do not need a license

Your accountant is not a user of your system. They are not a seat you pay for. There is nothing for them to install and no subscription for them to turn down.

Where this matters most

A migration.

When you move from another system, your accountant needs to answer one question: does this tie out? That is a review task, not a send-me-the-file task.

The QuickBooks import produces a reconciliation. It compares what came across against your old trial balance. You can hand them that directly.

It makes a good first use of the link. A defined question, a defined answer, and a record that they signed off before you started working in the new system.