Give your accountant the file, not the shoebox

Most of what a small-business accountant bills for is reconstruction: working out what happened from a bank export and a folder of receipts. Here is how the accountant view in ExactSplit changes that, what your accountant can and cannot see, and what the quarterly sign-off actually means.

ExactSplit · Updated July 16, 2026

What accountants actually spend their time on

Ask an accountant who does returns for self-employed clients what takes the time, and the answer is rarely the tax. The tax is the part they are trained for and it goes quickly. The time goes into reconstruction: turning a year of bank exports, a folder of photographed receipts, and a client's memory into a set of figures that can be put on a Schedule C with a straight face.

That reconstruction is billed to you, usually by the hour, and it is worse every year because the client is worse at remembering. Was the four hundred dollar charge at the hardware store for the job site or the kitchen? Nobody knows in February what they knew in June. So the accountant guesses conservatively, or asks, and asking is a chain of emails that takes a week and settles nothing.

ExactSplit is built around the number rather than the filing, and for most of a year that means it is doing the work of a bookkeeper. What it had no way to do, until now, was hand that work to the person who eventually needs it. The accountant view is that handoff.

What the invite does

In the dashboard there is a section called your accountant. You enter their email and, if you like, their name. They get a link. That is the whole invitation.

The link is the credential. There is no account for them to create, no password, no invitation to accept in a separate system. They open the link and they are looking at your books. The link is long and random, its hash is what we store rather than the link itself, and revoking it from your side rotates that hash so the old link is dead even if you invite the same person again later.

If email sending is configured on our side, they receive it directly. If not, or if you would rather, you copy the link and send it yourself. Either way the link is private to them and should be treated like one.

The moment they first open it, the invitation shows as active on your side, with the date they last looked. You always know whether your accountant has actually seen the books.

Exactly what they see, and what they do not

The accountant view is a deliberate subset of your dashboard, and the boundary is worth spelling out because the whole arrangement depends on it.

They see: the year's estimate, with business income, deductions, net earnings, self-employment tax, federal and state tax, and the projected full-year figure. The quarterly schedule, with each quarter's safe-harbor amount and due date. Estimated payments you have recorded. The reserve status: what should be set aside by now, what is, and whether you are behind on any deadline that has passed. Mileage totals. The closings pipeline if you are on the real estate workflow. And business transactions from the last one hundred and twenty days, each with its classification and how it was classified.

They do not see: account balances. Personal transactions. Anything classified as a transfer or ignored. Your bank connections or institutions. Prior-year figures you entered. Retirement contribution amounts. The safe-to-pay figure. Your settings beyond the trade, filing status and state rate the numbers depend on. Anything at all from another client, because every request through their link is scoped to your account and only yours.

The principle is that an accountant needs to see what happened in the business and what the tax consequence is, and does not need to see what you did with the rest of your money. The line is drawn there on purpose, and if a future version needs to move it, it will move visibly.

The transactions they see are the ones that matter for the return, and next to each one is a button. Ask.

Questions on a transaction

An accountant who sees a two thousand dollar deposit from an unfamiliar name, or a large expense at a merchant that could go either way, clicks it and types the question. It shows up in your dashboard, pinned to that transaction, with the merchant, date and amount attached so there is no ambiguity about which one they mean. You answer in a text box under it and, if the answer settles it, resolve it. If it does not, it stays open and either side can add to it. The whole exchange lives with the transaction rather than in an email thread that will be lost by the time the return is prepared.

The accountant can also resolve an item themselves once they have what they need, and reopen one that turns out not to be settled. Resolved items collapse but do not disappear, so in January there is a record of every question asked and every answer given.

Some things are not in the bank feed. The 1099 from a client. A health insurance statement. The closing statement from a property sale. The accountant needs them, and today the request is an email that says please send me your documents, which the client reads as a request to find everything, which they put off.

Document requests

In the accountant view there is a request a document button. The accountant types what they need and it appears on your side as an open item with a clear label. You attach nothing in the app; this is not a document store and we did not want to become one. You send the document the way you already do and resolve the request so the accountant knows it is coming. The value is not in transmitting the file. It is in the list of what is needed being specific, visible to both of you, and impossible to lose.

This is the part that changes the relationship, and it is worth being precise about what it means.

The quarterly sign-off

Each quarter on the accountant's view has an approve button. When they click it, the figure as it stands at that moment is recorded, with their name and the date. On your dashboard, that quarter's card gains a green mark saying who approved it. What you are looking at is no longer just what the software computed. It is what the software computed and what your accountant, having seen the inputs, agreed with.

Then the number moves, because numbers do. A late invoice is classified, a closing lands, you record a payment. If the quarter's figure has changed by more than a rounding error since the approval, the mark turns amber and shows the figure that was approved beside the figure that is current. Neither of you can miss it. The accountant can withdraw the approval, look again, and re-approve, and the new figure is recorded.

This is not us putting words in an accountant's mouth. The approval is theirs, made from the same numbers you see, and the app's role is only to remember what they approved and notice when it stops being true. It is also not a substitute for their engagement letter, their judgement, or their signature on the return. It is a sign-off on an estimate, and the app says so.

What it does do is close the gap in which most quarterly disasters live: the client believes the accountant has seen the numbers, the accountant believes the client is handling it, and nobody has looked since March.

The obvious user is a CPA or enrolled agent with a book of Schedule C clients who is tired of the shoebox. For them the view is a client's books already reconciled, with the questions they would have asked answerable in place, and a sign-off that turns a vague quarterly check-in into a recorded act.

Who this is for on the accountant's side

The less obvious user is a bookkeeper, or a spouse who does the books, or a business partner. The invitation does not check credentials. It gives a person you choose a bounded view of the business and a way to ask and approve. Whether that person is licensed is between you and them.

And an accountant with several clients on ExactSplit has several links, one per client, each opening one set of books. There is no accountant-side dashboard aggregating clients yet. There may be, if enough accountants ask; for now each link is its own front door.

The invite creates a collaborator record on your account with the accountant's email and the hash of their link. Every request through the link is authenticated by looking that hash up, then executed through the same tenant-scoped database client your own dashboard uses, so there is no code path by which the link could reach another account. The view itself is a projection of the same summary object your dashboard is built from, reduced to the fields listed above, which means the two can never disagree about a figure.

The mechanics

Questions, document requests and notes are review items, pinned to a transaction where relevant. Approvals are one row per quarter, storing the amount approved. All three tables are per-account with row-level security, like everything else. Every action is written to the audit log with who did it: you, or the accountant, by their collaborator record.

Revoke from your dashboard whenever you like. The link stops working within seconds, and everything they asked, requested and approved stays on your account, because it was yours.