Getting Started

VisiBooks keeps double-entry books for one or many entities (LLCs, corporations, properties) under a single login. This guide takes you from a fresh account to categorized transactions.

Workspaces and entities

Everything in VisiBooks belongs to a workspace:

• Entity workspaces — one per company. Each has its own chart of accounts, bank connections, transactions, and reports. Switch entities with the workspace picker in the sidebar.
• Your personal workspace — an inbox for personal accounts (like a personal credit card used across businesses). It routes spending to your entities rather than keeping a ledger of its own.

Bank connections, integrations, and API keys all belong to the workspace you create them in. If a Connect button seems to have “lost” a connection, check which workspace you’re viewing — the Integrations page shows “Connected in <entity>” when another of your entities holds it.

Starting from QuickBooks

If an entity has existing books in QuickBooks Online, use Settings → Start from QBO. The cutover imports your chart of accounts, opening balances as of a date you choose (they must tie to the penny — the import refuses anything that doesn’t balance), open invoices and bills, and an archived copy of your QBO history for reference. After the cutover, QBO is reference-only: post nothing new there.

Connecting banks

Settings → Integrations in the entity’s workspace:

• Mercury — direct API connection with real-time webhooks. Paste an API token from Mercury’s settings.
• Stripe (Direct API) — imports your Stripe balance transactions (charges, fees, payouts, refunds) as their own feed. Use a restricted key with Balance → Read only.
• Rentvine — for property managers: matches your bank’s batch deposits to Rentvine settlements and splits them into rent, late fees, security deposits, and prepaid rent automatically.
• Bank feeds via Stripe Financial Connections — for banks without a direct integration.
• CSV import — for accounts with no live feed, upload statements to a CSV feed. Imports are idempotent: re-uploading the same rows never duplicates them.

Each feed maps to a GL account in your chart (bank feeds to asset accounts, card feeds to liability accounts) — transactions you categorize post real journal entries against that account.

The books are append-only

One principle explains most of how VisiBooks behaves: posted entries are never edited. Corrections are reversals — a mistake and its fix both stay in the ledger, entries always balance, and closed periods reject changes. This is why undo creates a reversing entry rather than deleting anything, and it’s what makes the audit trail trustworthy.

Next: Daily bookkeeping — the transaction inbox and everything you can do to a bank line.