One ledger. Two books. Zero reconciliation.
This decision was made before the first line of code. A competitor cannot copy it without rebuilding their core. This page explains what it is, why it matters, and what it does for your daily work.
Every company really has two versions of profit
Not illegal double books. Profit under accounting standards and profit under tax law genuinely differ, and are meant to. The only question is: how is that difference managed?
Two systems matched by hand
- The books run all year in the accounting package.
- From February to April, someone pulls it all into a spreadsheet.
- Fiscal adjustments are pieced together from memory, scattered notes, and asking around.
- Working papers are built just for the return, then left until next year.
- If an audit lands mid-year, the whole thing restarts from zero.
One system, two ways of reading it
- Every journal line carries a marker: both, accounting only, or tax only.
- The accounting report reads the “both” and “accounting only” rows. The tax report reads “both” and “tax only”.
- Both read the same table. Not two tables that must be kept in step.
- A fiscal adjustment is just an ordinary journal line marked “tax only”, with its statute attached.
- The tax report can be opened any time, not just in April.
One marker that changes everything
Here are four sample transactions and how each is read by the two reports. Note that none is recorded twice.
| Transaction | book_scope |
Commercial book | Fiscal book | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sale of VAT-able goods | both |
Recognised in full | Recognised in full | — |
| Entertainment without the required schedule | commercial_only |
Recognised as expense | Not deductible | Income Tax Act art. 6(1) |
| Declining-balance depreciation excess | fiscal_only |
Does not appear | Increases depreciation expense | Income Tax Act art. 11 |
| Deposit interest (already final-taxed) | commercial_only |
Recognised as income | Excluded from the base | Income Tax Act art. 4(2) |
What you feel day to day
If someone amends a March invoice in September, both reports change right then. There is no second step. No sticky note saying “remember to update the working paper”. Nobody can forget, because there is nothing to remember.
This is not a feature you can add. It is the shape of the database.
Adding a “tax module” to a system that stores its tax figures separately does not produce the same thing. While two figures live in two places, they can differ. And sooner or later they will.
To copy this, a product would have to change its journal structure, rewrite its posting engine, and migrate every existing customer. That is not one release. That is rebuilding from the core.
The bridge from commercial to fiscal profit
This screen is available every day, not only when the return is being prepared. Every adjustment points to its statute, and every statute is clickable through to its text.
Sample data. Use the Tax or Reports menu on the left to move between screens.
What accountants usually ask
The book_scope column is an enumeration, not a boolean. Adding a third scope is a catalogue change, not an architectural one. What we will not do is add it before there is a real, testable need — an unused scope still has to be correct in every report, and that is a cost that never stops.
No, unless you grant it. The auditor and read-only consultant roles have their own permission boundaries, and which book they may see is part of that. The separation lives at the access layer, not the storage layer — which is precisely what makes it configurable with precision.
The rule catalogue is effective-dated. A 15 March transaction is computed under the 15 March rule and a 20 July transaction under the 20 July rule — inside the same annual report, with no if branch anywhere in the code.
Yes — and it is not an extra reporting feature; it follows directly from how the data is stored. A fiscal figure is the sum of journal lines, so tracing it means opening those lines. There is no summary table that can drift out of step with the detail, because there is no summary table.
Bring last year’s fiscal statements and we will re-run them
The fastest way to test the claims on this page is against your own numbers. Send us your latest fiscal reconciliation working paper and we will show you how it assembles itself here.
No credit card. No commitment. We prepare the sample data.