Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping is a full double-entry accounting system built into Bitment: a chart of accounts, bank and payment feeds, journal entries, reconciliation, financial reports, cost basis, and a Sales section for invoicing. A client can have more than one set of books, called a book, so a firm can keep an entity's operating books and a side project separate without leaving Bitment. If a client already keeps its books in QuickBooks Online, Bookkeeping can mirror that company instead of asking you to migrate it.

Where to find it

Bookkeeping lives behind the Financials tile in the dock, alongside Payroll, Taxes, and Wealth. Click Financials and choose Bookkeeping from the list that appears to switch into it; the same switcher lets you jump straight to Payroll, Taxes, or Wealth without leaving the Financials area. Inside a specific client, open the same apps from that client's sub-navigation under Apps › Bookkeeping, scoped to that client's own books.

Bookkeeping opens to a Bookkeeping | QuickBooks tab strip. The Bookkeeping tab lists your ordinary books; the QuickBooks tab lists only books mirroring a QuickBooks Online company. The QuickBooks tab is off by default for every account; if you don't see it, ask your Bitment contact to enable it.

Key concepts

Set up a book

  1. From the Bookkeeping tab, create a new book and assign it to a client (or keep it personal).
  2. Set up its chart of accounts. Start from one of the built-in industry templates (Professional Services, Restaurant, Retail, Construction, Nonprofit, or Real Estate) and adjust it, or bring an existing chart in with AI Import (see below).

Mirror a book that lives in QuickBooks Online

If a client's books already live in QuickBooks, you don't have to migrate them.

  1. Open the QuickBooks tab and click Connect a Book.
  2. Pick who the connection belongs to (Personal, or one of your firms), then continue to Intuit's sign-in and choose the QuickBooks company to authorize. Each Intuit sign-in covers exactly one company, so a firm with several QuickBooks clients connects each company through its own sign-in.
  3. A company you've already connected but haven't turned into a book yet appears under Already connected, ready to create its book without signing in again.
  4. Name the book (it defaults to the company name), assign it to clients, and create it. There's no accounting-basis or fiscal-year choice: a mirrored book always keeps accrual basis and USD.

Bitment imports the whole company (chart of accounts and every posted transaction) and keeps the two sides in sync from then on, so reports, registers, and every bookkeeping feature run on live QuickBooks data. A "Importing from QuickBooks" banner shows while the initial import runs.

Accounts and journal entries sync both ways: edit either side and the other follows within a few minutes, or immediately after Sync now on the book's Settings page. Everything else, invoices, bills, payments, deposits, and transfers, mirrors one way as read-only entries; trying to edit one in Bitment tells you to change it in QuickBooks instead. One thing deliberately does not come over: bank feeds. QuickBooks doesn't share its own Banking review queue with connected apps, so a QuickBooks-linked book has no linked accounts of its own; review bank transactions in QuickBooks and the resulting entries sync here.

A QuickBooks-linked book's firm ownership is locked to whoever owns the QuickBooks connection it mirrors, and can't be reassigned to a different firm afterward. The book's Settings page shows the connected company, sync status, last sync time, Sync now, and Unlink (which keeps every account and entry as ordinary local data and just stops the syncing). If a connection needs re-authentication, reconnect it under Settings › Connections › QuickBooks Online.

Connect a bank or payment feed

Feeds bring transactions in automatically:

If a feed's credentials stop working, it's flagged as needing attention rather than retried forever; fix the credential and use Retry sync.

For Plaid-connected bank feeds, Bitment can also pull the bank's own PDF statements into a library per feed. This costs money per statement (a paid Plaid product resold to you), so it never runs on its own; you request it explicitly and confirm the cost first. You can also upload a statement yourself into that same library, including by camera on a phone or tablet.

Get transactions in without a feed

Two other routes bring data in:

Categorize and post

  1. Open a queued transaction and categorize it to an account. Categorizing creates the journal entry automatically.
  2. Create a transaction rule from any categorization so similar transactions categorize themselves next time.
  3. For anything a feed doesn't cover, write a journal entry directly.

Record a transfer between your own accounts

When one movement shows up on two feeds (money leaving one account, arriving on another), book it as a transfer instead of categorizing each side separately, which would double-count it. Open the queued row: if Bitment recognized the pair, a "Looks like a transfer" banner names the other account, and Categorize as transfer books both sides with one balanced entry. If the two sides differ by a small amount, that's the network fee; the banner asks for a fee category (an expense account) so the fee is booked correctly rather than silently added to the receiving account's cost basis. To transfer several at once, select the rows and choose Categorize all as transfers. If nothing is detected automatically, categorize one side, then open the other row and choose Match to link it to the existing journal entry instead of creating a second one.

Reconcile

Reconciliation matches your books against a statement for the period. Bitment can auto-reconcile with AI: attach the statement and it clears matching items, notes what it couldn't find, and records the ending balance it read, so you review the result instead of ticking every line by hand. On a phone or tablet you can photograph a paper statement directly instead of scanning it first.

Reports and exports

The Reports section covers Balance Sheet, Income Statement, General Ledger, Open Invoices, A/R Aging, and (on books with a non-USD currency) Cost Basis. Balance Sheet and Income Statement support a shared reporting period, QuickBooks-style column layouts (Total, Month, Quarter, Year, or Class), and comparison columns against the previous period or previous year with dollar and percent change. Click any number in a report to drill into the transactions behind it. Export any report as PDF or CSV, saved to Files or downloaded to your computer.

Bitment also runs a cost-basis engine (HIFO, FIFO, or LIFO, globally or per wallet) over digital asset holdings, producing IRS Form 8949 and Schedule D output for a given tax year.

Sales: customers, products, and invoices

The Sales section covers receivables: customers (which can link to your CRM clients), products and services, and invoices that post to the ledger automatically when issued. Invoices can be paid through a public payment page, and connected payment processors (Whop, Zaprite, Maverick Payments) sync their own invoices and payments in, mapped to your customers and items.

Client billing

For a book your client pays for directly, a book's Settings › Plan section carries a billing panel with monthly and annual paid tiers alongside a free tier. Only the client paying for the book can subscribe, change plans, or cancel their own subscription from their client-facing Plan tab; an operator can see the current tier and usage but can't cancel a client's paid plan on their behalf.

Pin the books you work in every day

Hover a row in the Books list and click the pin at its right-hand end (or use the pin in a card's corner in grid view; on a phone, use the row's ⋯ menu). Pinned books stay at the top of the list no matter how you've sorted, searched, or filtered, and pins are yours alone: pinning a book never reorders it for anyone else at the firm.

Share a book and manage members

A book's Settings › Permissions section shows who can reach it: your firm's operators with implicit access through the book's firm assignment, plus anyone invited individually with the Share button. Books that a client created themselves for self-serve use carry their own member list on the client side, where any member can invite another person by email and remove them (the owner can't be removed). Either way, access changes take effect immediately for everyone on the book.

Clients can see their books

There's a client-facing bookkeeping view, so a client can be given access to their own ledger without seeing anything else in Bitment. It carries the same transactions, accounts, reports, and sales data as the operator view, plus a Files folder scoped to that book and, for self-serve books, its own Settings and member management. AI affordances are hidden on the client-facing side.

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