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Before you begin
The accountant workflow is private-gated, disabled by default and separate from ordinary accountant export packages. Both accounts need an authorized invitation and independent encryption identities.
Business only—not your whole financial life
Accountant invitations apply to Business data, not your Personal budget or Portfolio. The recipient signs in using their own account and their own decryption key. Payroll is a separate owner approval and is not automatically accessible even when Payroll intent is selected. Employee identity vaults, original documents and financial credentials are never implied by a broad Business role.
1. Approve the accountant and permitted actions
- In Settings → Sharing & Access, identify the accountant and independently verify their registered public-key fingerprint.
- Create a scoped invitation and wait for it to be accepted. That action alone does not disclose your books.
- Where enabled, separately authorize the accountant journal collaboration permission and select only eligible Business bookkeeping accounts to publish.
- Keep bank-transaction review and future Payroll permissions independently controlled; neither should be automatically enabled.
2. Adjusting journal proposals
An authorized accountant can use Shared with Me to prepare a balanced debit/credit journal using owner-approved chart accounts. The proposal is encrypted with a separate Business collaboration key and delivered to the owner's encrypted inbox.
The owner-side workflow validates access, eligible accounts, financial period, duplicates and accounting rules before an accepted command can reach the normal Business ledger. Delivery does not by itself guarantee posting. Unbalanced or unauthorized entries are rejected.
3. Review selected pending bank transactions
Where the private bank-review pilot is enabled, the owner hand-selects eligible pending Business transactions and separately publishes that review. The accountant can propose an approved category change, not rewrite the owner's transactions or bypass account locks. Closed-period, reconciled, already matched, stale or changed transactions are protected by owner-side revalidation. No full bank account browse is granted.
4. Understand the current limits
This is not yet QuickBooks Accountant parity. Full A/R and A/P document editing, broad bank reconciliation, unrestricted GL browsing, HST/CCA changes, original attachments and Payroll collaboration need separate reviewed permissions. Other work may exist in draft branches but is not a published capability.
5. Remove access safely
Revoke or expire the invitation to prevent new authorized reads or submissions. Previously viewed financial details cannot be remotely erased from the recipient's memory or saved files. For standard accountant handoff without this pilot, use accountant exports.
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