Quick-start: your first 30 minutes

GBooks Air runs entirely in your browser. There's no account to create, no credit card, nothing to install — the app just stores your books on your device. This guide gets you from a blank screen to a working set of books, and it shouldn't take more than about half an hour.

1. Open the app

Go to air.gshfinancial.com. The first time you land there, it creates an empty company file in your browser's local database. Bookmark the page — that browser, on that device, is where your books are going to live from now on.

2. Set up your business details

Open Settings and fill in the basics:

• Business name and address, which show up on your invoices, quotes, and PDF reports.
• Province or territory, which sets your default sales tax treatment — GST, HST, GST+PST, or GST+QST, depending on where you are. Rates for all 13 provinces and territories are built in and kept current with CRA figures.
• GST/HST number, if you're registered, so it prints on your invoices. Not registered yet? Leave it blank for now; you can always add it later.
• Fiscal year end — most sole proprietors just use December 31. Corporations can set whatever month end applies to them.

3. Import your bank transactions

This is where things start to feel real. Download a CSV export from your online banking (most Canadian banks will give you anywhere from three to twelve months of history), then head to Transactions → Import CSV.

The Smart-Mapper reads your file and figures out which columns are the date, description, and amount on its own — even for headerless exports like TD's — and shows you a preview before anything actually gets saved. Confirm the mapping, and everything lands in your review queue.

There's a full walkthrough at Importing your bank CSV if you hit anything unexpected.

4. Categorize your transactions

Work through the review queue and assign each transaction to a category (what bookkeepers call an account — office supplies, software, sales revenue, that sort of thing). Two things make this go faster than it sounds:

• Smart Vendor Rules — categorize "SHOPIFY" as software once, and GBooks Air offers to apply that same category automatically the next time it shows up.
• Receipt OCR — snap or upload a receipt and the app reads off the vendor, date, and total for you. More on this in Receipts & OCR.

5. Read your first Profit & Loss

Head to Reports → Profit & Loss. You'll see revenue, expenses broken out by category with a donut chart, and your net profit for whatever period you pick. If you imported a few months of history, this is probably the clearest look at your business you've had in a while.

6. Protect your work

Before you close the tab, go to Settings → Backup and download an encrypted backup. It takes about thirty seconds, and it's the difference between a lost laptop being annoying versus catastrophic. There's a proper setup guide at Setting up encrypted backups.

Where to go next

• Understand your chart of accounts
• Set up sales tax properly
• Send your first invoice