Using the web app

The web app is the graphical interface to IrisBooks, available to any signed-in account. It’s the primary surface for accountants and a comfortable second lens for owners who’d rather click than type. It works against the cloud copy of your book, so it needs you to be signed in and online.

Signing in

Accounts are email + password. From the sign-in screen you can:

• Log in with your email and password.
• Sign up (when open) — submit your email and password, then confirm with the verification code emailed to you.
• Reset a password via “Forgot password” — request a code, then set a new password.

These screens have a language switch in the top-right corner (labeled “日本語” / “English”) in case your browser’s language was guessed wrong. The emails behind these flows (verification codes, reset codes, invitations) arrive in the app’s language — the switch here, your browser on first visit, or whatever you chose later in Settings → Language.

If your accountant invited you to a book, sign up (or log in) with the exact email they invited, and the book is already there.

There’s also a CLI authorization page: when you run iris api login, the browser opens here to authorize the command-line tool. Confirm it’s your email and the expected tool, then approve.

Layout

The top bar carries your location:

• Dashboard — the one always-visible tab, for the screens that span your whole account.
• The book plate — the current book’s name and fiscal year, side by side with the book’s color dot. Click the name to switch books, open My Books, or create a new book. Inside a book, clicking the year opens the fiscal-year menu: every year the book spans with its close status — pick one to see that year’s journals, or jump to Year-end.

Whichever of the two is your current place is gently recessed into the bar — carved in, like a nameplate. Inside a book the plate is carved and tinted with the book’s color; on screens outside a book it sits flat and dimmed (Dashboard is carved instead) — clicking the book’s name takes you back inside.

Inside a book, the left sidebar lists that book’s screens: Journals and Activity, a Reports group (General Ledger / Trial Balance / P&L / Balance Sheet — all four always visible), and a Manage group (Accounts, Raw documents, Notes, Year-end, Settings). Outside a book there is no sidebar — the Dashboard and its related screens use the full width. On a phone, the book plate sits on its own row under the top bar, with the menu button for the book’s screens at its right edge.

Your avatar (top right) opens the account menu from anywhere: your Settings (see below), a language switch, and log out. The language item is always labeled in the other language (“日本語” / “English”), so if the interface ever ends up in a language you can’t read, the way back stays readable. Everything else — including the color theme — lives in Settings.

Each book gets its own accent color — the plate and the sidebar rail wear it — so you always know where you are. Net Worth opens from its card on the Dashboard, and My Books from the book plate’s menu; both have a ”‹ Dashboard” link to step back.

Dashboard

The home screen. With one book it shows that book’s headline numbers — revenue, expenses, net income, a P&L flow chart and balance-sheet treemap, and a banner if any entries are still incomplete. With two or more books it adds a cross-book view: a net-worth tile, an action queue (what needs attention across books), a consolidated P&L, and your top movers.

Journals

Journals is your transaction list. From here you:

• Filter and search — by date range, counterparty/payee, free text, status (posted / draft / closed / …), and amount (equals / greater / less).
• Export the filtered list to CSV.
• Open an entry to see its full detail: date, counterparty, status, tags, attached source documents (click through to the document), the line-item table with debits/credits and totals, and the narrative body.
• Create a new entry with the New journal button — fill in date, payee, lines, tags, and attachments, then save.
• Edit or delete an existing entry inline. Deleting is soft: the entry moves to the Deleted view, where it can be restored.
• Post draft entries — the detail page has a one-click Post button for draft entries (it activates once debits and credits balance). To post several at once — say, a batch of drafts captured through the remote connector — tick their checkboxes in the list and use Post selected.

History and the “after seal” warning

Every journal detail page has a History panel: the full audit trail of that file — each put / delete / move, who did it, when, the source, and the reason. If an entry was changed while its fiscal year was reopened after a seal, a clear “after seal” badge appears. This is the per-entry view of the durable correction/deletion record.

An entry whose date falls in a sealed fiscal year displays as closed (in the list, the Closed filter, and the detail page) and cannot be edited, deleted, or posted — the year has to be reopened first (from the Year-end screen, or iris reopen).

The Deleted view (from the Journals list) lists soft-deleted entries with who deleted them and when — deletions are recorded, not erased. Each row has a Restore action that brings the entry back into the Journals list.

Reports

Four reports, each with date/as-of filters, a “hide zero-balance rows” toggle, and CSV export:

• General Ledger — pick an account and see its full ledger for the period, with an optional opening balance.
• Trial Balance — balances as of a date; warns if debits ≠ credits.
• P&L — revenue and expenses with subtotals and net income for a period.
• Balance Sheet — assets, liabilities, and equity as of a date.

Reports show only posted entries. A “freshness” note tells you when the underlying figures were last computed, and an “incompletes” banner warns when draft entries exist that aren’t counted yet.

Accounts

The Accounts page shows your chart of accounts grouped by type (asset / liability / equity / income / expense). Click any account to open its ledger for the current fiscal year (or a custom range), with opening balance when a date filter is applied.

Raw documents

The Raw documents browser is a two-pane view of everything under raw/. Select a file and it renders inline — images, PDFs, parsed CSV tables, or text. The Cited by panel shows which journals reference the document, so you can jump from a receipt straight to the entry that booked it. This reverse drill-down is the book’s journal ↔ evidence audit trail: an auditor can walk from any receipt to the entries that booked it, and back.

Notes

The Notes browser is a read-only Markdown viewer for everything under notes/ — your working notes, decisions, todos, and the AI’s parse caches. A parse cache can link back to its source document in the Raw browser.

Activity

The Activity timeline is the book-wide audit log: every file operation (put / delete / move) across the whole book, filterable by actor, path, and operation. Each row can expand to show a content diff, and — if a prior version exists — a Recover button. Post-seal changes are badged. This is the book-level view of the durable history.

Year-end

The Year-end screen lists every fiscal year the book spans — how many journal entries it holds, its close state (Open / Closed / Reopened), and who closed it, when. It’s where a book owner runs the period close:

• Close a year. A preview shows what the year’s archive snapshot will capture and lists any remaining drafts. A year cannot close while drafts remain — post, delete, or redate them first (each listed draft links to its entry). Closing locks the year: every change to it is refused, on every surface, until the year is reopened.
• Reopen a year. Unlocks it for amendments. Every change made while reopened is permanently flagged “after seal” in the audit trail, and the screen counts the files amended. Close the year again when you’re done — the History panel keeps every close and reopen on record.
• Download the archive (zip). The closed year’s snapshot bundle, for handing to your accountant or an auditor. It’s built on first request; the download starts as soon as it’s ready.

The same flow works from the CLI (iris api seal, iris reopen, iris api archive download) — see Japan tax & compliance. Members who aren’t the owner see the same year list read-only.

Settings — your settings and book settings

Settings are split by what they affect, and everything is reachable from one door: your avatar menu (top right) → Settings.

Your settings (avatar menu → Settings — available everywhere, even outside any book) hold what belongs to you, not to a book:

• Language — switch the interface between English and 日本語.
• Appearance — light, dark, or follow the system.
• Books — every book you’re a member of, with your role; each row opens that book’s own settings page.
• Personal Access Tokens — create tokens for the CLI and integrations.
• Connect your AI — the remote connector URL and setup steps. See Your AI on the go.
• Connected apps — the AI apps connected through the remote connector, with a Disconnect button to revoke one’s access.

Book settings (sidebar → Settings, inside the book — or one click from the Books list above) hold what belongs to that book:

• The book’s ID and fiscal year.
• Posting approval (book owners only) — when on, posting an entry — and editing, deleting, or demoting an already-posted entry — can only be done here in the web app. Your AI assistant and the CLI keep preparing and editing drafts, but their attempts to touch posted entries are refused (APPROVAL_REQUIRED). Turn it on when you want every entry to pass through your own hands before it counts. Only the owner can change it, and only from this page — deliberately not from the CLI or a token, so an AI assistant can never lift its own gate.
• Inbound email — the book’s receiving address, the allowed-senders list, and quarantined mail with an “Allow sender” shortcut. See Receipts by email.
• Grants (book owners only) — manage who can access the book and at what role; invite new members by email. See below.
• Danger zone (book owners only) — delete the book from the cloud. See below.

Deleting a book

A book’s owner can delete its cloud copy from the book’s Settings → Danger zone. Deletion is deliberately a web-only ceremony: it requires your browser session and typing the book’s exact name — no CLI command, token, or AI assistant can do it, whatever its access level.

What deletion means:

• The book disappears immediately for every member — from the web app, the CLI, and connected AI apps.
• For 30 days the server keeps the data invisible in case of a mistake (contact support to restore within the window). After that, everything on the server — journals, files, and the correction/deletion history — is permanently destroyed. If the book has sealed fiscal years, the dialog warns you: deleting destroys those closed-period records and their audit trail, so export anything you must keep first.
• Local copies are never touched. A clone on your computer keeps all its files; iris sync there reports that the book was deleted and explains how to keep working locally or connect to a new cloud book.
• Email sent to the book’s receiving address is dropped, and pending upload links stop working.

Collaboration and roles

A book owner grants others access by role:

Invite someone by email from the Grants section; change or revoke a role anytime. (Owners can also manage grants from the CLI — see iris api grants.)

This is how an owner and an accountant share a book: the owner invites the accountant (or the accountant invites the owner), and both work against the same cloud book — the owner often via CLI + AI, the accountant via the web app.

Personal Access Tokens (PATs)

A PAT is a long-lived credential for scripts and the CLI, scoped by role (viewer / bookkeeper / full). Create one in your settings (avatar menu → Settings), copy it once (it won’t be shown again), and use it as IRIS_API_TOKEN. A token expires after 90 days unused — each use renews it, up to one year from creation. Tokens show their last-used time and expiry, and you can revoke any token immediately — here in Settings, or from the CLI with iris api token list / iris api token revoke (Full-access PATs can revoke tokens too; creating one stays web-only). Accountants use PATs to run iris api … across many client books from scripts.

Net Worth

Net Worth values your holdings across books — cash, plus non-currency units like foreign currency, crypto, or metals — and shows a total, the change versus last month, a trend line, the biggest movers, and a composition breakdown. The Settings tab there lets you choose which books count toward the consolidated total. It’s a best-effort “how am I doing” number, not an audited figure; units without a recorded price are listed so you know what’s missing.

For accountants — the daily shape

If you manage many client books:

• My Books is your client directory — each book with its draft count, fiscal-year status, last activity, and a Year-end column showing the previous fiscal year’s close state per client: closed, reopened, ready to close, or “N drafts” still blocking it. At year-end this column is your worklist — each badge links straight into that book’s Year-end screen.
• Switch into a client book to review and approve entries, check the Activity log for what staff did, and run reports.
• Use PATs + iris api … to script repetitive work across books.
• At year-end, close each client’s fiscal year and download the auditor bundle from Year-end (or the CLI) — see Japan tax & compliance.

Client books stay fully separate — there’s no cross-client aggregation, which is the right default for confidentiality.

Next: Japan tax & compliance.