Your first week on the tools

Do these in order. Each one takes a few minutes, and none of them needs the one before it to be perfect.

Day one: make the books yours

1. Set your business name and province. The province drives which sales tax you charge, so get it right before you send anything.
2. If you are registered for GST or HST, enter your number. TALISK_HQ uses it on your invoices and it is what turns on the filing worksheet later.
3. Look at your chart of accounts under Ledger › Accounting. The seeded chart already has what a trade needs: Materials & Supplies, Small Tools, Direct Labour, Subcontractor Expenses, Vehicle Expenses. If your accountant gave you their own chart, import it instead of retyping it.

Day two: connect the money

4. Connect your bank and card under Ledger › Banking. This is the single highest-value thing you will do, because from here on every charge arrives on its own and you are categorising rather than typing.
5. Set your opening balances if you are moving from another system or from paper. If you have a trial balance from your accountant, upload it: that is the quickest route and it creates your bank accounts for you.

Day three: the work

6. Add your first job. A job is what you cost against: materials, hours and mileage all point at it, and it tells you whether you made money.
7. Quote it. Write the scope in plain notes and TALISK_HQ drafts the quote. Email it, and your customer can accept it online by typing their name.
8. Add your workers under Invoicing › Workers, one line each. You need this before hours mean anything per person.

Every day after that

9. Photograph receipts at the counter. Open TALISK_HQ on your phone, snap it, and carry on. It extracts itself and lands in your books as a bill against the job you picked.
10. Log hours at the end of the day, on the phone from the van or on the desktop from the job's own screen. Always give a rate, because hours with no rate cost the job nothing and quietly understate what it took.
11. Log the drive. Mileage at the government rate is real money back, and the phone can measure the distance for you.

End of the job

12. Invoice it. Open the job and TALISK_HQ rolls up the unbilled hours, the materials with your markup, and the billable trips into one invoice with the tax worked out. Check it, then send it.
13. Watch it get paid. A bank deposit matches itself to the invoice. If the customer e-transfers you and the receipt lands in your inbox, TALISK_HQ spots it and offers to mark the invoice paid in one tap.

End of the month, and the quarter

14. Reconcile each bank and card under Ledger › Banking, so the books agree with the statement.
15. Check Books Health on the Ledger dashboard. It tells you what is missing before it becomes a problem: a completed job nobody invoiced, an overdue invoice, a bill with no receipt behind it.
16. File your sales tax from Ledger › Reports › Tax Summary. The worksheet gives you the figures line by line, you file, and then you mark the period filed so what you sent is frozen.

What TALISK_HQ does not do

Payroll, and any judgment call that belongs to your accountant: depreciation, adjusting entries, tax planning. You get the schedules and the listings they need, and they make the calls.