How Prosaic Works - Key Concepts

Prosaic is built a little differently from Xero, MYOB and other ledgers. Spend two minutes on these core concepts and the rest of Prosaic — onboarding clients, coding transactions, running reports and filing GST — will make far more sense.

The big picture

Your whole practice lives in one workspace. Inside it you have clients; each client can have one or more entities; and bank connections feed transactions in. Chart templates from a shared library keep client entities consistent — so you can work across all of your clients from one place. You can also speed up workflow and client setup by templating assets, or creating bank rules that work across clients.

Workspace → Clients → Entities → (bank accounts · chart of accounts · reports · GST)

Workspace

Your practice. There's one workspace per practice, and it holds everything: your clients, your team and their roles, your chart templates, branding, and settings. Your whole team works inside the same workspace — what each person can see and do is controlled by their role and the clients they're given access to.

Clients

The businesses and people you do the books for — the top-level grouping in your workspace. You add a client and invite them through your branded sign-up portal to connect their bank feeds, or you can import their statements manually.

There's no limit or extra cost for a client to connect accounts, business or personal.

💡Tip

Before you can set up a bank account you must add or invite a client. Under open banking, an individual person must authorise bank access through their bank login or mobile app.

Read more below, or for detail, visit this article:

https://help.prosaic.works/article/109-how-to-connect-bank-accounts-to-prosaic

Entities

The actual accounting entities that sit under a client. In Prosaic, an Entity is equivalent to a Xero subscription (or ledger). One client can have several entities — for example a company plus two rental properties, or a sole trader who also owns a rental. Each entity has its own chart of accounts, connected bank accounts, assets, reports and GST returns.

In Xero, each subscription or ledger is a unique workspace, you need to be a subscriber or invited into a clients subscription, then sign into that workspace to do work. Because it is a unique workspace, key things like bank rules, asset types can't be easily shared between ledgers, and when you add a chart template, that chart of accounts can then become unique and different in the actual subscription

In Prosaic, entities are more like a filtering layer over your clients data. They hold bank transactions, journals, reports, and chart templates, but remain much more connected within the workspace, allowing you do do things like, keeping chart templates in sync across clients, or creating a single bank rule that works for every client

Bank connections

Transactions come into Prosaic through bank connections, made securely via open banking with our partner Akahu (or by manual statement import). Connections sit at the client level, and you then assign each account to the relevant entity. Assign only the accounts you need to prepare returns — keep the rest available for year-end balances, loan interest and the like.

Who can connect a bank account? At this time, only clients and standard users can connect bank accounts — accountants and practice staff can't connect feeds directly. So to get bank feeds flowing you either invite the client to connect their accounts during onboarding, or invite yourself as a client using a separate email address (for example a personal Gmail) and connect the accounts yourself.

Learn more about connecting bank accounts in Prosaic here https://help.prosaic.works/article/109-how-to-connect-bank-accounts-to-prosaic

Because everything lives in one workspace, you're not logging in and out of separate files. The transactions screen lets you review and bulk-code across multiple clients and entities at once, with AI-suggested codes — then drill into any single entity for detail, reports or GST.

Charts of accounts — built from a master library

Prosaic includes a master library of standard chart codes (based on common MYOB Accountants Office and Xero Practice Manager structures). You build reusable chart templates from it — sole trader, company, trust, partnership, rental — and share them across entities. Update a template and the change flows through to every linked entity, so your whole client base stays consistent. New entities start from a Standard Business Chart that you can customise.

Coming from Xero? Charts aren't set up per-organisation from scratch. They come from shared templates, which is what makes practice-wide automation, coding and reporting possible.

Prosaic vs a traditional ledger, at a glance

Concept	Xero / traditional ledger	Prosaic
Structure	One organisation per subscription	One workspace, many clients & entities
Multiple activities	Tracking categories	Real entities, with sub-accounts & inter-entity reconciling (data dimensions coming soon)
Chart of accounts	Set up per organisation	Shared templates from a master library
Daily work	One organisation at a time	Code across clients from one screen
Connecting banks	Done by whoever owns the file	Connected by the client / standard user (invite them, or yourself as a client)

Where to next

Getting Started guide - getting set up in your workspace
Client Onboarding Guide — invite a client and get their bank feeds connected.
Connecting Bank Accounts to Prosaic - key concepts about clients <> banks <> entities