Setting Up Your Company (Entity Setup)

Before you can record a single transaction in Ambivo Books, you need to create an entity — the company whose books you are keeping. This guide walks through that one-time setup, explains every choice on the form, and covers the decisions you should not defer.

What Is an Entity?

An entity is one company, organization, or business unit. It is the top-level container for everything you do in Books. An entity owns:

• Its own chart of accounts
• Its own transactions, journal entries, and ledger
• Its own base currency and locale
• Its own fiscal year and reporting periods
• Its own financial reports

If you only run one company, you will create exactly one entity and never think about this again.

If you run several companies under one umbrella (a holding company with subsidiaries, multiple LLCs, etc.), each company is its own entity. They all live under the same Ambivo tenant. The data model supports multiple entities, and your session can be pointed at any one of them, but the Books frontend today opens the first entity returned by the API at sign-in — a per-session entity-switcher in the UI is on the roadmap. See Multi-Entity below.

Getting There

First-time users

If your tenant has no entities yet and you have permission to create one, Books takes you straight to the Set up your company screen the moment you log in. There is no other way out — the rest of the app is hidden until an entity exists.

Adding another entity

If at least one entity already exists, the setup screen is reached from the entity switcher in the top bar. (Adding entities is typically restricted to administrators.)

The Setup Form

The setup form has four short sections.

1. Company name

The legal or trading name of the company. This appears on every report, every invoice, and at the top of every PDF you export.

You can rename the entity later, but doing it after invoices have been sent is awkward — pick the name you want printed on financial statements.

2. Base currency

The currency the entity will report in. Every report (Trial Balance, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow) is presented in the base currency. Foreign-currency transactions are translated to this currency for reporting.

Common currencies appear in the dropdown: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, INR, JPY, CHF, CNY, SGD, HKD, NZD, ZAR, BRL, MXN, AED, SAR, KRW, SEK, NOK.

Pick carefully. The base currency is effectively permanent. Changing it later means re-translating every transaction, which Books does not do automatically. If your business operates in multiple currencies, pick the one you want your financial statements in — typically your country of registration's currency.

3. Fiscal year start month

Which calendar month your fiscal year begins on. This drives every period-end report.

The setup form lists all twelve months in the dropdown. As you focus on one, an info panel below the dropdown shows a regional note for that month — for example:

Other months are valid but uncommon. Pick whichever month your tax authority and bank statements expect. This is also effectively permanent — changing it after transactions exist creates short, awkward "stub" periods that auditors dislike.

4. Chart of Accounts preset (optional)

You can either start with no accounts and build the chart yourself, or pick one of three presets:

You can always add, rename, or deactivate accounts later. The preset is a starting point, not a commitment.

If you skip the preset, the entity is created but the accounting module stays disabled — meaning the Accounts, Journal Entries, Transactions, and Reports menu items will not appear. You can enable accounting later from Settings → Enable Accounting and pick a preset at that time.

Why Some Settings Are Locked After Creation

Two settings — accounting basis (Cash vs. Accrual) and accounting standard (US GAAP vs. IFRS) — are decided at the entity-creation API level and cannot be changed afterwards. The setup form does not currently expose them as user-pickable fields; the backend defaults them to Accrual / US GAAP when the entity is created. They appear on the Settings page as read-only badges.

This is by design. Both choices affect how every transaction is interpreted historically, and changing either after the fact would invalidate prior reports. If you need a different basis or standard, talk to your administrator before the entity is created — once it exists, the right path is to create a new entity.

For most US small businesses, the defaults (Accrual, US GAAP) are what your CPA expects.

Entity Setup, Step by Step

• Log in to Books.
• On the Set up your company screen, fill in: Company name (your entity's legal name), Base currency (typically your country's currency), Fiscal year start (typically January), Locale (Ambivo prefills this from your browser language; change it if needed).
• Choose a Chart of Accounts preset (or skip to enable accounting later).
• Click Create Company.
• When the success screen appears, Books builds the entity, sets up the accounts, creates an opening reporting period, and redirects you to the Dashboard.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

When you submit the form, Books does several things atomically:

• Creates the entity record with your chosen name, currency, fiscal year, and locale.
• Creates the base currency entry for the entity.
• Creates the current reporting period (year 1, period 1).
• If you picked a preset, builds the chart of accounts with the right accounts, codes, and types.
• Marks the entity as the user's current entity so subsequent API calls operate on it.
• (If a preset was picked) sets books_enabled = true on the entity.

If anything fails midway, the whole setup is rolled back so you do not end up with a half-created entity.

Multi-Entity: Running Books for More Than One Company

Some tenants need to keep books for several companies — for example, a holding company with subsidiaries, or an entrepreneur with multiple LLCs.

In that case:

• Each company is its own entity.
• All entities live under one tenant.
• Each entity has its own chart of accounts, transactions, and reports.
• The current Books frontend binds your session to one entity at sign-in (the first one returned by the API). A per-session entity-switcher in the UI is on the roadmap; until then, switching between entities typically requires support intervention or a separate login session per entity.
• Inter-entity transactions are not posted automatically — if Company A pays a bill on behalf of Company B, you record that as two separate transactions, one in each entity.

To add another entity today, ask your tenant administrator to create one via the API or admin tools, or set one up via the standard setup form when you have only that entity selected.

Permissions

Creating an entity requires the C (Create) permission on the Books module. By default, the first user in a tenant has full permissions. Other users will see a "you don't have permission to create a company" message and need their administrator to either create the entity or grant them the permission.

If you see this and believe it is wrong, ask your tenant administrator to check your module_access.books permissions in the Ambivo admin tools.

After Setup: What to Do Next

Now that the entity exists, the typical next steps are:

• Open Settings and confirm everything looks right (currency, fiscal year, locale).
• Set your Payment PIN if you plan to send payments via Wise — see Authentication (UG-002).
• Connect your bank — see Bank Feeds (UG-030).
• Add your customers and vendors — see Customers (UG-011) and Vendors (UG-012).
• Import opening balances if you are migrating from another system — see Data Import (UG-060).
• Create your first invoice or bill — see Invoices (UG-020).

If you are migrating from QuickBooks, the order is slightly different — see QuickBooks Migration and Read-Only Mode (UG-090).

Common Questions

Tips and Best Practices

• Use your legal name for the entity name. It appears on every PDF.
• Pick the Standard preset unless you know you need something else. It covers nearly all small-business cases without overwhelming you.
• Match your fiscal year to your tax filings. This avoids a stub period at year-end.
• Don't create one entity per project. Entities are for separate companies, not for separate departments or locations within one company.
• Confirm the base currency before you record anything. Of every setting, this is the most painful to change later.

Related Guides

• UG-001 — Welcome to Ambivo Books
• UG-002 — Sign Up, Login, and Authentication
• UG-010 — Chart of Accounts
• UG-070 — Multi-Currency
• UG-080 — Settings and Configuration
• UG-060 — Data Import