Brick Books → Guides → Checking Your Books
The health check, what each finding means, and which problems Brick Books can safely fix for you.
Check My Books looks for things that appear to be actually wrong, rather than simply unfinished.
It is worth running after an import, and always before you hand anything to your accountant.
Every finding is shown with the evidence behind it.
Brick Books only makes a correction when you choose to. A backup is taken first, and every change is recorded in the audit log.
Every finding opens the thing it is referring to.
A suspicious date opens that entry. A possible duplicate shows the matching entries together.
You see the evidence before deciding what to do.
An entry is dated before your business existed, or sometime in the future.
Usually this is a simple typo, such as entering 2004 instead of 2024. It matters because the transaction can end up counted in a year where your business did not even exist.
Brick Books only offers an automatic correction when there is supporting evidence, such as surrounding entries from the same import having dates that make the intended year clear.
Fixable.
A financial year with only a handful of entries, years away from everything else, is almost always a mistyped date (2022 instead of 2026, say). Those entries do not show up in your year list or charts, so this is where they are pointed out.
Open each one and check the date. If it is wrong, correct it and the entry moves into the year it belongs to.
Not fixed automatically. Only you know which date is right.
The year stored against an entry does not agree with the entry's own date, which means it may be appearing in the wrong reporting year.
Fixable.
An entry has no amount recorded against it.
Sometimes that is a placeholder somebody meant to come back to. Brick Books flags it rather than guessing what the figure should have been.
Two or more entries have the same date, amount and description.
Sometimes that really is a duplicate. Sometimes it is completely legitimate, such as paying the same postage amount for four different parcels on the same day.
Brick Books deliberately does not delete these for you. Automatically removing a genuine transaction would be worse than leaving you something to check.
A filed receipt is still linked to an entry that no longer exists.
The receipt itself is untouched. Brick Books can remove the broken link for you, and the document stays exactly where it is.
Fixable.
A year contains purchases of resale stock, but no closing stock figure has been entered. See the stocktake guide.
This one can have a significant effect on how useful your profit figure is.
Brick Books can see costs in a year, but no sales income.
That may be completely normal if you were buying stock before you started selling. It can also mean sales from that period have not made it into your books.
The check is simply there so you know which situation applies.
Brick Books cannot know that a number is wrong just because you typed the wrong plausible number.
If you meant to enter 54 but entered 45, there may be nothing structurally unusual about the entry for the program to detect.
Check My Books is designed to find contradictions, impossible dates, missing structural information and other warning signs.
It cannot replace checking the underlying figures themselves.