A client has invited you, or is about to, and you have never heard of this software. Fair. This page is the ten-minute orientation, written for the person who has to sign the accounts: what the ledger guarantees, what you can pull from it on day one, what it costs you (nothing), and how you get data out. No demo call, no sales thread.
Not a cashbook with reports on top. Every economic event in IQ Books posts through one double-entry kernel, and the kernel enforces rules the incumbents treat as suggestions.
Bank lines, invoices, bills, receipts, payments, stock movements, depreciation, FX: each posts a balanced journal entry. Debits equal credits on every entry, checked at write time and backstopped by database triggers. There is no path that writes an unbalanced figure into the ledger.
Nothing is ever edited in place. A correction is a reversal of the original, marked as such, plus a fresh entry, and both stay visible forever. You have seen what "edited" transactions do to an audit trail elsewhere. That cannot happen here, structurally.
The lock date is inclusive and enforced on every write path: create, edit, void and confirm, checked against both the old date and the new one, so nothing can be edited into or out of a closed period. A closing date that yields to a password is a suggestion. This one is a lock.
Every monetary value is stored as integer minor units with half-up rounding. No floating point anywhere in the ledger, so no penny drift between a report and the postings behind it.
An invoice's outstanding balance is gross minus receipt and credit-note allocations, computed per query. Draft, issued, partially paid, paid and void are derived from allocations and journals. There is no editable "mark as paid" field to disagree with the ledger.
All ten UK codes including reverse charge, domestic reverse charge and postponed import VAT. Codes clamp by account type, so VAT cannot be booked against a balance-sheet control account. Reverse-charge documents carry net only, with the VAT self-accounted as paired input and output legs on VAT Control. The nine boxes are recomputed server-side from posted journals on every submission; the client's screen never supplies them.
Numeric chart of accounts by type, fixed system accounts for VAT Control and Suspense. Anything unmapped lands in Suspense, visibly, rather than being silently guessed into an expense code.
Any figure on any report resolves to journal lines. A full audit log records who did what and when. The double entry is never more than one click away, which is not something you can always say about a bank-feed line elsewhere.
Sign in, open the organisation, and the working set is where you expect it. Every export below is free and unlimited.
Yes, the books largely keep themselves: bank transactions arrive coded by CodeIQ's eight-phase pipeline, receipts scan into draft bills, invoices match to payments. But nothing touches the ledger until a human confirms it. Suggestions arrive as drafts with a confidence score and the method that produced them; the review queue is the workflow, not an afterthought bolted on for compliance. Your role does not shrink here. The keying shrinks. What is left is the judgement, which is the part that was worth your fee in the first place.
Made in honour of Xero, QuickBooks and Sage, but with all the spite of someone who has used them for years and found them lacking.This is the list.
The same login carries the rest of The IQ Suite, working from the same ledger. You lose nothing by your client's choice; you gain a stack.
Yes: balanced journals on every write, immutable postings with reversal-and-repost corrections, derived statuses, integer-pence storage, enforced period locks, full audit log. Section one of this page is the specification.
Yes, free and unlimited: transaction-level GL as CSV, trial balance, all statements, aged reports, VAT workings. No export paywall exists.
VAT under MTD, ITSA for sole traders, and FRS 105 / FRS 102 1A statutory accounts tagged as validated iXBRL and filed to Companies House. Filings require an explicit final declaration; nothing files itself.
Nothing. Invited professional seats are free. The client's plan covers the organisation; IQ Suite plans run from £5 a month and the free tier covers one organisation with the bank-first feature set.
The same as anywhere, except the mess is visible: unknowns sit in Suspense rather than guessed categories, every posting shows its provenance, and the drafts queue shows exactly what has not been reviewed yet. You will know the state of the books in minutes, not billable days.
Ten minutes with the trial balance will tell you more than any page of ours. Register free, accept the invitation, and start where you always start.
Register free About IQ Books Why it exists