Getting Started

This walks through the first hour. By the end of it you will have a client ledger connected, your firm's branding on every report, and a finished PDF pack you could send.

Sign up at reportcraft.com.au, or from the Xero App Store listing. Coming from Xero, you will be asked only for your name and email address - no access to any accounting data at that point - and the sign-up form arrives already filled in. Set a password and you are in.

Your free trial starts straight away. No credit card is needed to begin, and nothing is charged until you choose a plan.

Your account is a firm, not an organisation. Invite your staff to it and they share the same client ledgers, the same report packs and the same branding. One person does the setup below once, and everybody gets it.

Open Client Ledgers, then + Add Company, then the accounting package the client is on. You will be sent to that package to approve the connection and choose the organisation or company file. No password of yours or your client's is ever entered in Report Craft.

Report Craft then reads the chart of accounts and up to five financial years of trial balance. It takes a minute or two on a large file. When it finishes, the ledger shows as Synced with the date and time it last pulled.

Connect as many clients as you like. Authorising a second organisation adds a second ledger - it never replaces the first.

Open the new ledger and look at the Connection panel before you print anything. Three things are worth a glance:

• Client Type - company, trust, partnership or super fund. This decides which reports the pack offers you: trust resolutions and an appropriation statement only appear where they belong. On a connected ledger this comes straight from the accounting package and is read-only there, so if it is blank, set the organisation type in the package and refresh.

• Business - the client's line of business, which prints on the front cover. Same story: it comes from the package.

• Currency - Report Craft prepares Australian reports. If the ledger is kept in another currency, the page says so in amber and every report prints a line naming the real currency. Nothing is converted and nothing is refused, but you should know before you send it.

A ledger missing its Client Type or Business is flagged on the Client Ledgers list, so you will not reach year end and find out the hard way.

Refresh a ledger any time with the Refresh control on its row, or press F12. You rarely need to: every connected ledger that has not already synced that day is refreshed overnight, so the first person in each morning is not waiting on it.

This is the step worth doing properly. It is what makes the output look like your firm's work rather than ours, and you only do it once:

• Your logo, the signature that appears on the compilation report and declaration, and a cover image if you use one.

• Your report headings and colours, so every statement is titled and styled the way your firm words it.

• Your standing compilation text and declaration wording, which then appear on every client's pack without being retyped.

• The company tax rate your tax schedule should apply.

Everything here is firm-wide. Change it later and every client's next pack picks it up.

With a ledger selected, open the Reports menu and look at the Trial Balance first. It is the report everything else is built from, so if the trial balance looks right, the rest will too.

Then build the pack. Take one of the six built-in packs, or pick the reports you want and save your own selection as a pack to reuse on every client. Set the order they print in, choose how many years of comparatives to show, and generate. You get one PDF with a front cover, headers, footers and page numbers throughout.

Fourteen report types are available: Front Cover, Compilation Report, Declaration, Trading Statement, Profit & Loss, Appropriation Statement, Balance Sheet, Detailed Accounts, Tax Schedule, Trial Balance, Cash Flow Statement, Trust Resolutions, Notes and Comments.

If a client has more than one entity, create a consolidation and attach the member ledgers to it. The group's statements are built from the same reports as a single ledger, so there is nothing new to learn.

Use elimination entries to strip out intercompany loans, sales and investments so the group statements show external activity only. These are held in Report Craft and applied to the figures it holds - they are never written back to your client's ledger.

A group can mix accounting packages, which matters when a client's entities are split across two of them. Consolidations are not counted as client ledgers, so they cost nothing.

Once a pack is right, set it to send itself. On the ledger, choose the pack, how often it should go - monthly, quarterly, every six months or yearly - and the address it should reach. From then on the ledger refreshes, the pack builds and the PDF arrives in that inbox without anybody opening Report Craft.

• The financial year. Report Craft works to the Australian year, 1 July to 30 June. There is nothing to configure.

• An account is printing in the wrong section. Classification comes from what the accounting package says about the account, not from its name. See the Xero Account Classification page in this help section for how to move one.

• The numbers look stale. Refresh the ledger (F12). If it still disagrees with the package, check the Connection panel for a sync error.

• A ledger has gone red. The connection was revoked or has expired. Reconnect from the ledger itself: it comes back with its mappings and prior-year figures intact rather than arriving as a new client.

• Removing a client. Disconnecting a ledger revokes our access to that organisation and deletes the ledger and its reports.

Email support@reportcraft.com.au. We are around business hours AEST, Monday to Friday, and anything sent outside those hours is picked up the next business day.

We are a small Australian team, so you will be talking to someone who knows the product rather than a call centre. If you would like a hand setting up your first consolidation, ask - we would rather spend half an hour with you than have you work it out alone.