Keeping Good Books: The AI Setup Workbook (Fillable PDF)

Stop doing your books by hand.

Most small business owners are not bad at bookkeeping. They are doing work a system should be doing for them — retyping transactions, hunting receipts, and assembling reports at eleven at night in January.

Keeping Good Books: The AI Setup Workbook is the setup project that ends that. Not a lecture on accounting. A worked, decision-by-decision build of a system that keeps its own records.

By the end you will have:

• Connected every account that moves money, and verified the feeds are actually complete
• Chosen a platform on evidence rather than a marketing page, using a 90-point scoring sheet and a real trial protocol on your own transactions
• Written the standing rules that stop you making the same correction every month
• Set your reports to arrive on a schedule instead of waiting for you to run them
• Automated the four monthly checks that catch the errors a clean-looking profit and loss will hide
• Built a delegation map: what the system does alone, what it drafts for your approval, and what only you can decide

What is in it

Thirteen parts and two appendices, every one of them fillable. Roughly four hours of setup across four sittings, plus a four-week training log to track whether the software is actually learning your business or just filing things faster.

Parts One to Five — the decisions. Where you actually are. Separating business from personal. Cash or accrual. How you pay yourself. Building a chart of accounts the software can categorize into. These come first because no tool can make them for you, and a system configured before they are settled will be wrong quickly, confidently, and at volume.

Parts Six to Nine — the build. Turning on the transaction flow. Automatic receipt capture. The rules you write once. Reports that arrive without being asked.

Parts Ten to Thirteen — using it. Runway and working capital. Contractor paperwork as a gate rather than a January project. A monthly close with an owner named against every step. And a readiness check for the day a lender, buyer, or accountant asks to see the numbers.

Appendix A gives you six prompts to run against your own exported data — finding miscoded transfers, catching duplicates, explaining month-over-month changes, and drafting your own categorization rules.

Appendix B is the troubleshooting section: what to do when the cash does not match, when something is stuck in Uncategorized, or when a liability shows a negative balance.

It is genuinely fillable

Every table, checkbox, and answer space is a real form field. Open it in any PDF reader, type into it, and save. Your answers stay in the file. That matters, because the last part asks you to go back to page one and answer the same ten questions again — and the whole point is to see what changed.

Print it if you prefer. It is US Letter, 8.5 x 11, and lays out cleanly on a home printer.

Who it is for

Owners of startups and small businesses who are doing their own books, or who want to understand the system before they hand it to somebody else. No accounting background assumed. Nothing in here requires you to already own a specific platform — the workbook names none, because pricing and features move faster than any published page.

The companion book

This workbook accompanies Keeping Good Books: A Startup and Small Business Guide to AI Accounting, available on Amazon.

The book makes the argument. The workbook installs it. Each part names the chapters it draws on, so you can read further wherever you want the reasoning — but you do not need the book open beside you. Every exercise here gives you what it needs to be answered.

Details

• Format: Fillable PDF, US Letter (8.5 x 11)
• Length: Thirteen parts plus two appendices
• Delivery: Instant download after purchase
• License: Single business use. Not for redistribution or resale.
• From: Omnijax Accounting — www.omnijax.co

Educational purposes only. This workbook does not constitute accounting, financial, legal or tax advice. Retention periods and reporting obligations vary by jurisdiction. Always confirm your own requirements with a qualified professional.