How to prepare year-end accounts, with the working papers done for you.

Set your firm settings

Open PrepIQ and expand Firm settings at the top of Start a job. Set these once and every job inherits them. Start with “Jurisdiction”: “United Kingdom (incl. Northern Ireland)” or “Ireland”. It decides which tax rules RiQ follows and which set of working papers you get back, so it is not a label on the front sheet (the UK and Irish rules are set out on the features page). A Northern Ireland company pays UK corporation tax and files a CT600, so a Northern Ireland practice sets United Kingdom.

The rest decide how the output reads: “Reporting currency”; “Tax computation” (prepare it and post the tax journal, prepare it but post no tax journal, or leave tax to the firm entirely); “Reporting framework” (FRS 102 Section 1A, FRS 105 for a micro-entity, or full FRS 102); “Client query email”; “Dividends”; “Rounding”; a “Query threshold” above which unexplained differences are flagged for the reviewer; the “Practice name”; and “Anything else, in your own words”. Press Save settings.

Tip. If you compute and file tax in your own software, choose one of the last two tax computation options. With “Prepare it, but post no tax journal” you still get the computation and the workings, and the papers say the firm posts the tax elsewhere.

Start a job

Under Start a job, enter the “Client” and choose the “Entity”: “Sole trader” or “Limited company”. It is not cosmetic: it selects the template and the rules, and both the accounting and the tax treatment follow from it. A sole trader's trade, property and savings income is kept in its right place for self assessment, with drawings, capital introduced and private-use restrictions handled. A limited company keeps its directors' loan accounts separate, takes dividends against reserves, and has its corporation tax computed.

“Jurisdiction” is taken from your firm settings; change it here if this one client is somewhere else, and only that job moves. A job is stamped with its jurisdiction when you upload, so changing your settings later cannot disturb a job already running. Use “Anything RiQ should know” for anything not in a document.

Upload the records

Drop the client's bookkeeping and supporting documents on The client's records: the ledger from Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Pandle, or any general ledger as CSV or Excel, with the trial balance beside it. Any format works: spreadsheets, CSV, PDFs, scanned or photographed paperwork, and the client's own emails explaining odd items, which are read as evidence like anything else. Up to 30 files, each up to 50MB. Open What to send for the best result, PrepIQ's year-end accounts checklist: a full-year transactions or general ledger export and the trial balance (CSV or Excel, not Apple Numbers), bank statements for the whole year including second accounts such as Wise, PayPal or Stripe, aged debtors and creditors, finance agreements (HP, loans, mortgages and completion statements), payroll (P11s, P32 and P60s), VAT returns, and a note on anything unusual.

Two optional boxes sit below. “Last year's working papers” lets RiQ carry the balances forward (leave it empty for a brand-new client). “Your working-papers template” makes RiQ prepare into your firm's own template, so the set carries your layout, sheet order and labels; leave it empty to use the built-in PrepIQ template. Both take a real Excel workbook (.xlsx or .xls).

Tip. The ledger matters as much as the trial balance. A trial balance is a set of closing totals; the general ledger is what lets every figure be traced to the postings underneath it.

Choose the depth and hand it to RiQ

Under Preparation depth, choose “RiQ default” (5,000 credits), RiQ's standard preparation and right for most jobs, or “RiQ maximum” (10,000 credits), its deepest reasoning for complex, messy or high-stakes year-ends. Then press Hand it to RiQ. The credits come out of your practice plan's allowance.

You can have two jobs open at once, from upload until you press Finish, and the job list shows how many slots are free. If both are in use, Finish a job first opens: sign off a finished set and finish it to free a slot.

Follow the job

The job appears under Your jobs, with three counts across the top: “With RiQ”, “For you” and “Finished”. Its status moves from “In RiQ's queue” to “RiQ is preparing the papers”, while it reconciles the sources and builds the schedules, and the card shows the stages as they pass and RiQ's live updates beneath them.

RiQ reconciles every source it has, builds the schedules, posts them to an extended trial balance with each figure linked back to the sheet it came from, recalculates the set end to end and checks that it balances. Nothing is plugged to force a balance. If it cannot complete something, the status reads “Needs your attention”, with notes on what it could not finish.

Review the set

When the status reads “Ready for your review”, press Download for the workbook. Read it like a junior's file. At its heart is the extended trial balance: opening balances, recorded, unrecorded and adjustment columns, all footing and balancing, with profit carried through to the balance sheet. Behind it sit the schedules: records summary, fixed assets and depreciation, capital allowances (feeding only the tax computation), one finance reconciliation per agreement, VAT reconciled to the returns, and the tax computation. Every posted figure is linked to its working sheet, and any figure typed in is labelled with its source.

RiQ's notes opens RiQ's working notes: every posting, assumption, judgement and query, so your review starts from a trail. Where a treatment needs your call or the client's confirmation, it is marked TBC and raised as a query, never decided silently. Client email shows the draft query email to the client, when there are client questions; Copy to clipboard or Download .txt.

Tip. The queries go on the query register whatever you choose for the client email; the email setting only decides whether a draft is written for the client.

Ask RiQ for changes

Anything you want done differently goes back through Ask RiQ. Write it in plain English under “Ask RiQ to make a change”, attach anything the client sent late under “Add documents” (optional), and press Send to RiQ. It reworks the same set with the full context of what it already did, rather than starting again; the status reads “RiQ is applying your changes” while it works.

The confirmation says what it costs before anything is charged: each revision is a full re-pass, 1,250 credits on a RiQ default job or 2,500 on a RiQ maximum job.

Sign off and finish

When the file is right, press Sign off. The confirmation reads “Sign off this job? This records your approval.” and the status becomes “Signed off”. The papers are prepared for your review and your sign-off; nothing is filed on your behalf, and no judgement in them is final until you have made it.

Download what you need, then press Finish and confirm with Finish job: it wraps up and clears the working files: the client documents are deleted from our servers, and the job moves to the archive. Anything you have already downloaded is unaffected. Finishing also frees a slot for a new job.

Tip. For a client kept in IQ Books, finish only after the adjusting journals are in the ledger. If they are not, PrepIQ warns you (“Journals not in the ledger yet”) before it lets you finish anyway.