How to use Daybook

1. Signing in

There are three ways in and they all end in the same place. Whichever you use, it is the same account.

• Google — one tap, nothing to remember. Google is told you are signing in; Daybook receives your email address, your name and your profile photo.
• A password — optional, at least eight characters. Set it from your profile once you are inside. It exists because waiting for an email is a poor thing to do to someone with a queue at the counter.
• A link by email — arrives in a moment, works once, expires in an hour. If it is not in the inbox, look in the spam folder; the first message from a new sender often lands there.

The first person to sign in has no organisation yet, so the app asks them to make one. Everybody after that arrives through an invitation and joins the organisation that invited them.

2. Creating the organisation

An organisation is one book. Give it the name of the business, then set three things that are awkward to change once the book has entries in it.

• Currency — how every amount in this book is written and totalled.
• Language — English or Greek. Each person picks their own and it follows them between organisations; the money keeps the organisation’s own format. A Greek-speaking bookkeeper can keep the books of a business trading in pounds.
• Time zone — this is what decides when “today” ends. A cashier may only record today, and this is what today is measured against, so it matters more than it looks.

You are the owner of the organisation you create. One person can belong to several organisations and switch between them from the top of the sidebar; each one is a separate book with its own members.

3. Setting up banks, shifts and categories

Settings is where the book is shaped before anyone types into it. Three lists are worth doing on the first day.

• Banks — one row per bank, and for each one whether it has a card terminal and what commission that terminal charges. Card takings are then reported both gross and net of commission, and the commission itself is counted as an operating expense. Put in your own rates; none are assumed. Card takings you do not split between banks are charged the average of the rates you entered.
• Shifts — if the day is split (morning, afternoon, night), name the shifts here and the Day screen will ask which one a closing belongs to. If you close the register once a day, leave this alone and record the whole day.
• Expense categories — rent, wages, electricity, and whatever else you actually pay. These are what the charts and the summary group by, so name them the way you already think about them.

Modules are in the same place. Claims and obligations can each be switched off if they do not apply to you; claims are off until you turn them on.

4. Bringing in a book you already keep

Most organisations arrive with a book already: a note on a phone, a spreadsheet, a page in a diary. The Import screen takes it.

Paste the text straight in — a note copied out of a phone works, ragged lines and all — or upload a text, CSV or Excel file. Dates and amounts are read in Greek and in English, and both decimal conventions are understood, so 1.234,56 and 1,234.56 both mean the same thing.

Nothing is saved until you have looked at it. What was read comes back as a table: each row’s date, its cash, its card and where it is going. Correct anything wrong, untick anything you do not want, and only then import. If the day and the month could be the wrong way round, the app asks which it is instead of guessing.

5. The daily job

This is the part a cashier does, every time the register is closed. It should take under a minute.

1. Open Day. It opens on today.
2. New closing.
3. Choose the shift, if the organisation uses shifts.
4. Type the cash and the card total. Card can be split per bank if you want each bank’s commission worked out separately; fill in the banks and the total keeps itself.
5. If you count the drawer, type what you counted. The difference against what was recorded is shown underneath. It is a note, not an accusation.
6. Save.

The entry appears for everybody else straight away, on their own devices. Underneath, the day’s breakdown works out the cash you should be holding: cash takings, less deposits, less anything paid out of the drawer, less withdrawals.

Cash deposits — money taken out of the drawer and put into a bank — are recorded on the same screen, because that is when you do it.

6. Inviting people and what each role sees

Members is where people are added. An invitation is a single-use link: it stops working once somebody has joined with it, and it expires after fourteen days. Email it, message it, read it out — it is just a link.

Each person gets a role, and a role is simply a set of ticked boxes. Change any single box afterwards and the role is shown as Custom.

• Owner — all ledgers, settings and members, plus deleting the organisation and changing owners.
• Admin — all ledgers, settings and members. Cannot delete the organisation or change owners.
• Cashier — files today’s register and sees today. Nothing else.
• Viewer — sees everything, changes nothing. This is the one for your accountant.

The cashier is the case worth understanding, because it is the reason the app exists in this shape. A cashier can file today’s closing and look at today. They cannot open the timeline, the charts, the summary, the expenses, the withdrawals or last month. They cannot see what the business makes.

That is not done by hiding buttons. The rules are written into the database itself, and a request for a month a cashier may not see is refused there. Someone who knows what a browser’s developer tools are gets exactly as far as someone who does not.

7. Expenses, withdrawals and obligations

Three different things, kept in three places on purpose.

• Expenses — what it costs to run the business: rent, wages, electricity, the card terminal’s commission. These reduce the profit. Mark the ones that come every month as standing, so they are easy to spot in the list. On the current month’s expenses screen, standing items from last month can be added in one go when they are still missing.
• Withdrawals — money an owner takes for themselves. These do not reduce the profit. They are the profit being shared out, which is why they sit on their own screen and never appear in the profit chain. A month can be profitable and still leave nothing in the drawer, and this is the pair of numbers that shows you why.
• Obligations — cheques and supplier invoices, each with the month it falls due and whether it has been paid. What you buy from suppliers is the cost of the goods, and it is counted as such in the month it belongs to.

So a cheque is not a purchase. It settles an invoice that was already counted. Marking it paid changes what you owe; it does not add a second cost. This is the other half of the same idea as withdrawals: both are money moving, not money being spent.

8. Claims

Some businesses do not get paid the whole price at the counter. A third party — an insurer, a scheme, a company account — is billed for the rest and pays weeks or months later, minus deductions of its own. Claims is for that money.

You record what was submitted for a period, and later what actually arrived and when. Until it arrives it sits as outstanding, and both the summary and the cash forecast count only what you expect to keep.

The deduction rate is not typed in and not assumed. The app looks at the periods you have already settled — what you submitted against what you were paid — and works your own rate out from them. Before you have settled anything there is no estimate, and it says so rather than inventing one. Any period can be overridden by hand if you know better.

The module is off by default. If nobody bills a third party, leave it off and the screen never appears. Settings, then Modules.

9. Reading the Summary

Summary is the month on one page. The chain runs from what came through the register down to what is actually left:

Underneath it, separately, is what the owners drew out — placed there rather than in the chain because it is a distribution of the profit, not a cost against it.

Below that is a cash forecast to the end of the month. You type the balance you are actually holding now — register plus bank accounts — and the money expected in and out fills itself from your outstanding claims and the obligations falling due. Both are editable. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

The twelve-month trend under that is the same net profit figure for each of the last twelve months, so a bad January is visible as a bad January rather than as a surprise.

10. Exporting, backing up, installing

An owner can export the whole book — every closing, deposit, expense, withdrawal, obligation and claim — as a single JSON file, from Settings, then Data. It is a complete copy. Keep one somewhere you control.

Individual sections also export as CSV, which is the format to send an accountant, and any page can be printed or saved as a PDF from the browser’s own print dialog.

To install it on a phone, open it in the phone’s browser and add it to the home screen. On iPhone that is Share, then Add to Home Screen; on Android the browser offers it by itself. It then opens full screen with no address bar. It still needs a connection: offline it shows a page saying so, and it does not hold entries back to send later.

An owner can also delete an organisation’s data entirely, from the same place. That cannot be undone, which is why it is the last thing on the page.