What it does
The day’s numbers stay clear. Income in, expenses out — recorded the way you’d write them on paper, kept on your own machine.
Your books live on your machine. They don’t expire with a subscription. They don’t ask for a login every morning. They don’t disappear when an internet connection fails.
It’s built for the small business that does its own bookkeeping. The shape is familiar — receipts, bills, the bank, the categories you already think in. Nothing to learn. Much to recognise.
Australian tax conventions are built in. When the year ends and your accountant asks for the file, you have it ready, in a form they recognise.
How it works
You install it. It opens. You start entering — receipts, payments, invoices, transfers. There’s no setup wizard chasing you for a credit card.
Day to day, the numbers go where they belong. The bank reconciliation shows what’s matched and what’s pending. The categories carry between months without you re-teaching them.
At quarter and year-ends, the totals are already there. You produce the reports your accountant needs and hand them across. Your books stay on your machine the whole time.
Coming from another bookkeeping tool? There’s a one-time companion that helps you bring your history in. Run it once, finish, and never think about migrations again.
Through the quarter
A small business does its books in the margins of everything else — between serving customers, packing orders, and closing up for the day. equosBooks is shaped for that. A receipt gets entered when it lands on the desk, not saved up for a dreaded session at the weekend. A supplier bill goes in when it arrives. The bank gets reconciled in a few quiet minutes, matched against what’s already recorded.
Because the categories carry forward, the second month is faster than the first, and the sixth faster again. The books stop being a project you sit down to and become a habit that keeps itself close to current. So when the BAS is due or the year closes, there’s no scramble to reconstruct where the money went — the record has been building itself the whole time, and the numbers your accountant asks for are already there.
What it doesn’t do
It runs basic Australian payroll — pay runs, PAYG withholding, super, and payslips for a small team on straightforward wages. It isn’t a full payroll service, though: complex awards and the harder entitlements belong with a tool built for that.
It’s not a tax agent. It tells you what’s in your books — clearly, accurately. Your accountant tells you what to lodge.
Your books live on your machine, not in someone else’s account. If you want an off-site copy, there’s an optional backup — encrypted with a passphrase only you hold — and nothing leaves your desk unless you switch it on. Private is the resting state, not a setting you have to go looking for.
It’s not built for a team scattered across locations, each editing at once. It’s one set of books on one machine — yours. If several people need the same live picture of the business, that’s a job for the EQUOS cloud platform, not for this.
And it won’t run the rest of your operation. Orders, stock, freight, the movement of the business itself — those live in the platform. equosBooks keeps the books, and leaves the operating to the tools built for it.
Connected to
equosBooks sits beside the EQUOS cloud platform but doesn’t need it. If you already use EQUOS for your operations, this gives your bookkeeping the same calm clarity in a place that stays on your desk. If you don’t use the cloud platform at all, equosBooks stands on its own — small, considered, free to keep.
There’s no account to close and nothing to unsubscribe from. The books are a file on your machine: you can back them up, carry them to a new computer, or hand a copy to your accountant, the same way you would any document you own. Nothing about them depends on us still being here — which is, quietly, the whole point of keeping them on your desk.