It’s your record.

who can reach it

Your practice, kept to itself

Multi-tenancy done the expensive way round: a database each, rather than everybody’s rows in one table with a filter in front of them.

• Your practice has its own database

  Not a column on a shared table with your name in it. Its own schema, and its own database login with no rights outside it — so a query that reaches for somebody else’s row fails rather than quietly returning one.

• And its own file storage

  Your drawings and receipts are not in the same place as ours or anybody else’s. Opening one issues a link that works for a few minutes and then stops, so a URL copied out of the address bar is a dead link tomorrow.

• Clients run on their own routes

  A client portal is not the back office with the dangerous pages hidden. Every client route narrows its query to the signed-in person before it asks the database anything, so there is no view that could return another client’s row and happens not to be linked.

• Permissions show the page AND open the data

  Typing an address does not get round a permission. Somebody without invoicing has no invoicing screen and no invoicing figures anywhere else either.

• Some things even an owner cannot see

  Personal tasks, somebody’s own deduction log, their personal finances and their own invoice details — withheld even from an owner using “view as” to debug a screen. They are a person’s own money, not a fault to reproduce.

and us?

We cannot look unless you let us

This is the question people are too polite to ask on a call, so it is answered here instead.

• We cannot sign in to your portal

  Not until you switch it on. It is off on every portal, only an owner can turn it on, and the longest window allowed is a fortnight. It ends by itself on the date shown.

• And while it is on, everybody can see that it is

  A bar sits across every page for all your staff, not just whoever switched it on. They are your clients’ records; your office gets to know when somebody outside can read them.

• What support cannot do, even then

  Hand out a login, a role or a permission — including to itself — or extend its own window. Nothing we do while helping you can outlast the access you set.

• The log outlives the access

  “Has anybody been in?” gets asked weeks later. Turning the switch off closes the door; it does not erase the record of it having been open.

getting it out

Leaving is a supported operation

Software you cannot leave is software you are stuck with, and being stuck with something is not the same as liking it.

• Every job archives to a bundle you could rebuild from

  A zip of every file plus a project.json carrying the details, clients, consultants, stages, the dated record of what happened, documents with their revisions, what was issued to whom and when, tasks, invoices and hours. A folder of PDFs is a backup of the paperwork and a loss of everything else.

• The year leaves as a pack, not a screenshot

  Everything (ZIP) is the workbook, the summary, the full report, a PDF of every invoice paid in the year, every receipt, and a list of anything the system could not account for — in numbered folders with a READ ME.

• And the smaller exports are everywhere

  Transactions as CSV, exactly what is on screen. Your tax log as CSV in two sections, because the first thing an accountant does is put it in their own software. A whole mailbox folder as a ZIP.

• Nothing is deleted quietly

  Actions that change records tell you what they will affect first. A withdrawn transmittal stays on the register, marked. A removed email stays in the retention PDF with the reason and where it went. A flag whose subject has gone still shows, marked “no longer there”.

• Close a year and it stops moving

  “Books closed up to” means everything on or before that date cannot be created, edited or deleted anywhere — enforced when the record saves, not by greying out a button, so it holds for a stale tab left open since last year.

• Erasure shows you what it cannot take

  Erasing somebody removes their name, contacts, address, ABN, bank details and sign-in. It keeps what the law makes you keep — an issued invoice carries the supplier’s name and ABN for five years — and it says so before you confirm, in words you can read out to the person asking.

and what it doesn’t do

Six things we won’t claim

Every one of these is in the portal’s own help guide, in these words, where the person using it will meet them. A limit you discover at your first pay run is one you were sold past.

• It does not lodge your BAS

  It puts the quarter in the shape the form asks for, works out the figures and builds the pack. Lodging is still you or your agent.

• A Single Touch Export is an export, not a lodgement

  One press takes a pay run out in the Phase 2 shape the ATO asks for, ready for whoever files it. That last step — transmitting — needs us to be a registered Digital Service Provider, and we are not one. Single Touch Export is our name for the file; Single Touch Payroll is the ATO’s name for the thing it is filed into.

• It does not calculate your payroll tax

  Or compose a tax treatment code. Both are published figures that change, and a plausible wrong one on a tax document is worse than a blank. A practice with employees on PAYG still needs something that does.

• The tax estimate is a guide, and says what it cannot know

  Spouse details, trust distributions, foreign income, franking credits, reportable super. It lists them rather than quietly leaving them out of a figure somebody might rely on.

• Nothing here knows whether its tax rates are current

  They are entered per financial year as data, and each year carries a note saying where its figures came from and when they were checked. The portal cannot tell you when they next change.

• It does not read the words inside a PDF

  A drawing’s name, revision and tags are searched; the text on its pages is not held anywhere, so it cannot be. Said here rather than discovered mid-search.

If there is a question here we have not answered, it is probably a good one. Ask it — the answer will be as plain as these.