Client Books

On the Books tab, Sodium asks where the client does their accounting and offers the accounting platforms it supports - Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and Sage. Pick one and you connect through secure OAuth; no API keys and no shared logins.

If your practice already has a connection to that platform, Sodium lists the organisations it can see and you simply choose the client's. If they sit under a different login, sign in with those credentials instead.

From there the numbers are simply there - a client's profit and loss summary, read from their books rather than retyped into Sodium:

Once connected, the Books tab reads directly from the client's accounting software:

• Overview - a profit and loss report for any date range you choose, so you can see how the client is trading before a meeting or a piece of work.
• Balance Sheet - the client's position as at any date you pick, in the platform's own groupings of assets, liabilities and equity. The date shown is the one the platform actually ran the report to - Xero rounds to the end of the month asked for - so nobody reads figures as at a day they were never stated for.
• Bank Accounts - each account with its name, account number, currency and balance.
• Invoices - number, customer, date, due date, status, total and outstanding amount, so you can see what has been raised and what is still owed to them.
• Chart of Accounts - the full nominal ledger with code, name and account type, searchable by code or name.

Overview and Balance Sheet appear on the platforms that publish those reports - today Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent. Sage's API exposes neither, so on a Sage connection those two tabs are simply not there and Bank Accounts leads instead.

How the profit and loss is drawn follows the platform too. Xero and QuickBooks return a sectioned report; FreeAgent returns a summary, which Sodium lays out as the sum it actually is.

Nothing is copied into Sodium and kept in a stale cache - each tab queries the client's accounting software when you open it, so what you see is what is in their books right now. Client Books is read-only: Sodium never writes to or changes the client's accounting records.

It is a different job from client billing, which is about the invoices your practice raises for your own fees. Client Books is about their numbers, not yours.

And if the question is not what the numbers say but how far to trust them, Bookkeeping Health sits on the same tab — a quality score for the books themselves, read from Xenon Connect.

Having the books one click from the client record removes a lot of small interruptions:

• Check trading before a year-end meeting or a planning call, without opening another application.
• Answer a balance sheet question - what the client holds, what they owe - as at the date the question is actually about, rather than waiting on an export.
• Look up a nominal code while preparing a task rather than asking the client for it.
• See whether an invoice the client has queried is still outstanding on their side.
• Give a team member the financial context for a client they have not worked on before, without handing out logins to the accounting platform.