Getting started

PeriodGuard keeps a full history of every change to your accounting records and emails you, and your accountant if you like, when anything changes in a month you have already closed. It only reads your books; it never changes them.

1. Sign in

1. Open the sign-in page and enter your email address.
2. Click the magic link in the email you receive. There is no password to remember.

2. Connect a business

1. On Your businesses, press Connect.
2. Sign in to your accounting software and choose the organisations PeriodGuard may read. It asks for read-only access.
3. You come back to PeriodGuard, which starts reading the records of each business you chose.

The Free plan covers one business; paid plans cover more (see Billing). Organisations beyond your plan are not connected.

3. The first read, then a snapshot every hour

PeriodGuard first reads every covered record once, as its starting point: invoices and bills, credit notes, payments, overpayments, prepayments, bank transactions and transfers, manual journals, contacts and the chart of accounts. A large business can take a few hours, because PeriodGuard stays well inside the limits on how often it may ask.

After that it takes a snapshot every hour on a paid plan (every 6 hours on Free) and compares each changed record with the version it kept. Changes appear on the business's page, newest first. See The change history.

4. Tell it which months are closed

PeriodGuard reads your accounting lock dates by itself. If you do not use them, or close months before you set them, set Closed through on the business's page: the last day of the last month you closed. Then add your accountant's email under Who gets the alerts.

5. Download or share

• Download as CSV gives the filtered history, one row for every field that changed.
• Report for your accountant gives a plain, printable list of the changes in a period, before and after, who and when.