Usage Guide

First-Run Onboarding

The first time you launch Reconciled, a 7-step wizard walks you through setup. It only appears once — after that, the app goes straight to your data.

1. Welcome — a quick introduction screen.
2. Data Location — choose iCloud Drive (recommended — it's auto-detected and keeps your data synced across Macs) or Local Only. A custom folder works too.
3. Profile — your name, company, address, phone, and email. This shows up on your invoices.
4. Home Office — optional. Enter your office square footage and total home square footage, and Reconciled works out your deductible percentage automatically.
5. CCA Assets — optional. Add any capital assets you already own (laptop, vehicle, etc.). You can skip this and add assets later.
6. First Boss — add your first client, with hourly rate, KM rate, and income type.
7. Done — a summary of where your data will be saved.

🏠 Dashboard

Your landing screen — a snapshot of where things stand.

• This Month — gross income, hours logged, expenses, KMs driven, and KMs billed. Each card links straight to the relevant panel.
• Year to Date — gross income, total expenses, and estimated net income.
• Year over Year — compares this month to the same month last year, with colour-coded up/down indicators. Only shows once you have a year of history.
• Outstanding Invoices — anything marked Sent but not yet Paid, with a one-click Mark Paid button.
• Recent Activity — your last six actions across work logs, expenses, and KM trips.

📅 Work Logs

A calendar-based monthly view for logging your work. Each day can have three kinds of entries:

• Time — start/end time, with sliders to split the hours across multiple bosses if needed (there's a "Split Evenly" button for convenience). Add notes if you like.
• Kilometre — distance billed to a specific boss. This automatically syncs to your Kilometre Log.
• Extra — anything else billable, tracked by units and cost per unit.

🧾 Invoice Management

Generating an invoice

Pick a boss and a date range, then generate either a Standard invoice or a With Breakdown version — a two-page PDF where the second page gives your client a detailed work log for their records. You can preview before generating, and there's a monthly summary preview with a little vibe-check emoji depending on how the month went (🤑 / 😊 / 😐 / 😬).

Tracking invoices

Every invoice you generate is logged with a status: Draft, Sent, or Paid. From the History tab you can mark invoices as sent or paid, email them directly (opens Mail.app with the PDF attached — just make sure the boss has an email address saved), or delete a record if needed (the PDF itself stays on disk).

💸 Expenses & CCA Assets

Expenses

A month grid gives you all 12 months at a glance with colour-coded category totals — click into any month for the detail view. Each expense tracks subtotal, GST (auto-calculated, overridable), and total after tax, plus attachments for receipts (JPG, PNG, PDF, or HEIC — drag and drop or use the file picker).

Categories follow the CRA's T2125 form out of the box — the tax form Canadian sole proprietors use to report self-employment income and expenses (advertising, meals, insurance, office expenses, and so on) — and each one can be set to a different business-use rule:

You can also save frequent expenses as templates for one-click re-entry.

CCA Assets

For bigger purchases — laptops, vehicles, equipment — Reconciled tracks Capital Cost Allowance depreciation using CRA's half-year rule. Everything is calculated automatically from the purchase date and cost, so there's no running balance to manage by hand. Common CRA classes (Class 50 for computers, Class 10 for vehicles, and so on) are pre-loaded with their correct rates, or you can set a custom class.

🚗 Kilometre Log

A chronological log of your business trips, grouped by month with running totals. Set your year-start and year-end odometer readings and Reconciled works out your business-use percentage automatically — which feeds directly into vehicle expense deductions. Any KM entries logged through Work Logs show up here automatically (tagged "auto-logged"), and if you've been tracking KMs there without realizing it syncs, there's an "Import from Work Logs" button that backfills everything safely (it won't create duplicates, even if you run it more than once).

📊 Accounting Exports

When it's time to hand things off to an accountant, or just archive a year, there are a few export options:

• Excel (.xlsx) — a formatted 4-sheet workbook: Expenses, Kilometre Log, Income Summary, and CCA Schedule.
• CSV — a zip with plain-text expense and KM log files.
• Annual Tax Report (PDF) — a full multi-page report with income summary, expense breakdown, CCA schedule, KM summary, and a full annual net income summary with GST reconciliation.
• Receipt Archive — a zip of every receipt for the year, organized by month.
• Year Archive — a complete backup of a year's data, which can be re-imported later (it won't overwrite existing data by accident).

Once a year is safely archived, there's also an option to clear it from local storage — this always requires typing the year to confirm, and is never offered for the current year.

👥 Boss Management

Add and manage the clients ("bosses") you work for. Each one is marked as either Self-Employed (T2125) or T4 Employment — T4 bosses are automatically excluded from your self-employed income calculations and tax report, since that income is handled differently at tax time.

👤 Multiple Profiles

More than one person can use the same installation, with completely separate books — nothing is shared between profiles. If more than one profile exists, you'll see a profile picker on launch; a Switch button in the sidebar lets you swap users mid-session. New profiles can be added from the picker or from Settings → User Profiles.

Handy extras

• Search — the sidebar search bar finds anything across work logs, expenses, and KM trips, with live results you can click straight through to.
• Undo — deleting an entry shows an Undo snackbar for 8 seconds before the delete is committed.