Build financial statements
through conversations.
Arus keeps proper double-entry books for a small business without asking anyone to learn accounting. It asks what happened. It writes the entry.
Free while in early testing, no card. In your browser, on every device you sign in on. Look around an example business first.
This month
The same entries produce the balance sheet and the cash flow statement too. They agree because none of the three is stored — each is a question asked of one journal.
One question, one entry
Bookkeeping software usually hands a small business a form — accounts, debits, credits, tax codes — and asks it to already know accounting. Arus turns that around.
- 1
You answer
Someone paid me for something I sold. I bought stock. I paid a bill. Plain questions, asked in the order they make sense.
- 2
Arus posts it
Each set of answers resolves to one balanced journal entry. The accounting happens where it belongs — out of sight, and correctly.
- 3
The books follow
Profit, what the business holds, and where the cash actually went. All three derived from the same journal, so they cannot contradict each other.
Three trades, one question tree
A kitchen, a wholesaler and a services business meet different transactions. Pick one and see how the same plain-language tree guides each business without hiding the other valid choices.
Stock lasts days. A kitchen can count ingredients used this week as a cost. Anything material left at the period end still belongs in stock.
What Arus wrote
| Account | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of what you sold | 240.00 | |
| Cash in hand | 240.00 |
A cost on the day it happened, and the cash gone with it.
Food & drink, step 1 of 4: What happened?
Arus asks what the business does when you set it up, and offers the answers that trade uses most, first — a kitchen is shown the immediate-cost choice first, with a clear period-end limit, while a wholesaler is shown tracked stock first. It never hides an option and never changes what a record means.
What it looks like
Photographed from Arus as it is today — these are its screens, not a design.
What it does
Asks, rather than tells
No accounts to pick, no debits and credits to balance, no tax codes. Arus asks what happened in the words an owner would use, and works the entry out from the answers.
Real double-entry underneath
The plain questions are the surface, not the substance. Every answer becomes a balanced journal entry, so the books are ones an accountant or a bank will recognise.
Business and personal, kept apart
Money the owner puts in and money the owner takes out are recorded as what they are. That is where small books usually go wrong first, so it is handled from the start.
Built for the counter, not the desk
Recording takings or a cost is a few taps on a phone in the gaps of a working day, rather than an evening with a spreadsheet at the end of the month.
A till for the counter
Tap what sold, take cash or card, and say which bank the card machine pays into. A dish or a treatment takes the rice or the oil it uses off the stock list, and closing the till puts the day's takings in the books.
Checked before it goes out
A product can carry its own checklist. Something set aside for a customer is not handed over until every step is ticked, and the customer is asked to check it too, or sign to say they chose not to.
Bills and fees that come round again
Rent, a subscription, insurance: say when it is due again, and change it later if it moves. Two weeks before, it is on the To do list with last time's figures filled in, and everything further off is listed under Coming up.
The bank, checked against the books
Type a statement's closing figure and tick each line you can find on it. What is left is what to look at, and a To do tab says when the next check is due.
Refunds, returns, and customers who never pay
A refund comes off what was earned, returned goods go back on the shelf at what they cost, and a debt given up on stops showing as money the business still holds.
Equipment that wears out
Say how long something should last when it is bought. Arus works out each year's wear from that, offers it on the To do tab, and lets the item leave the books when it goes.
Invoices in another currency
When a foreign invoice is paid at a different rate, it is cleared in full and the difference is shown as what the rate did — not left behind as money still owed.
Encrypted with the business's own key
Every record, customer and supplier name, note, till sale and signature is encrypted before it is stored, with a key of the business's own that is itself locked by a key kept outside the database. A copy of the database on its own shows none of it.
The books balance, and we check
Every build runs more than 3,000 checks against generated books and realistic food, retail and service workflows — a toy shop, a spa and a small kitchen, each run through a month, a till shift and a collection. They assert the identities that have to hold for the statements to mean anything: assets equal liabilities plus equity, and opening cash plus what moved equals closing cash. If one of them failed, the build would not ship.
When more than one person keeps the books
A shop grows and the owner stops being the only one who records anything. The person at the counter has to ring up sales. The person in the stockroom has to value what arrives. Neither of them needs to know what the business makes, and one of them should certainly not be able to read the payroll off a screen by the till.
Front office
Runs the till, hands over what customers collect, and asks them to check it before they leave. Sees what has been taken and what stock has gone — not what the business earns, and not the payroll.
Back office
Checks deliveries against the supplier's note, ticks the checks on what is set aside for a customer, and records what arrives — how many, not what it cost. The day's takings never reach the screen.
Manager
Everything both of those do, and more: prices and promotions, what each product and dish costs, pricing deliveries and their bills, skipping a check when there is a reason, and what sold against what it cost. Wages, tax, borrowing and the owner's own money are not shown.
Accountant
Every record and all the statements, the bank check and closing the month — what an accountant needs, and one accountant takes no paid place. Wages are shown, never changed; no till, stockroom or team.
Owner
Everything a manager does, plus the whole book — every figure, all three statements — and who else is on it. A business can have several owners, with one of them the main owner.
Each level holds everything below it. A manager covering the counter or the stockroom never finds a button missing, and everybody can see their level at the top of every screen. Staff join with their own email address, from the owner’s link or an eight-character code, and an invitation only opens for the person it was sent to.
A role is where somebody starts, not where they are stuck. Jobs move — the counter assistant checks in deliveries on Tuesdays, somebody covers the stockroom for a fortnight — so the owner can hand one person a single extra duty without promoting them. Wages, the owner’s own money, borrowing and tax are the four the owner alone can hand out.
Partners, and who changed what. When a business has more than one owner, one of them is the main owner. If another owner edits or removes a record already in the books, it counts straight away, every screen says it is waiting for approval, and the main owner approves it or puts the record back exactly as it was. A history lists every record added, edited or removed, by whom and when.
Every feature, at every size. The till, the stock list, checks and signatures, reconciliation and reminders are the same for a sole trader as for a team of forty. What changes between sizes is only how many people keep the books.
The part that matters is where the line is drawn. A member’s device is never sent the entries their duties do not cover — the filter is in the query that reads the books, not in the screen that draws them — so there is nothing to intercept and nothing a modified app could reveal. And where a figure is only part of a figure, Arus says so, because a wrong number nobody thinks to question is worse than one that was withheld.
For businesses without a bookkeeper
The market stall, the home kitchen, the two-person workshop. Real enough to need books, small enough that nobody is employed to keep them.
Moving an existing business over? Read the playbook — the owner’s set-up, what to delegate, and every role’s day, step by step.
If that is you, tell us what your books actually have to do — it is how we decide what Arus needs next. Write to arus@kapix.io.