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Accounting export

Hand your accountant one file a month instead of a pile of reports: every account, the VAT, and every cent taken, as a single journal entry they can import straight into QuickBooks.

Most months end the same way: your accountant asks for the numbers, and someone spends an afternoon pulling reports and retyping totals into a spreadsheet. The accounting export replaces that. It collapses a whole month into one journal entry — what you earned split by category, the VAT on it, and every payment you took — as a file your accountant imports in one go.

There is a one-off setup: your accountant has to tell you which of their account codes each kind of money belongs to. After that, running a month is three clicks.

Who can do this

Admin only. The export reads the same ledger the Daily summary and Account book do, and changes nothing — running it is safe, and running it twice is safe.

First, get the account codes from your accountant#

Reports›Accounting export›Chart of accounts

The chart of accounts, opened over the month it is about to change. Two categories here still need a code from the accountant.

Every bookkeeping system sorts money into named buckets — a chart of accounts. Your accountant already has one, and the names in it are theirs, not ours. Some practices' accountants use numbers like 114; others use words like Vaccination Income. FastVet does not care which — it writes whatever you type, exactly as you type it.

So the one thing to do before your first export is send your accountant this question:

Note

“For each of these, which account should it go to?” — then list the categories you sell (Medication, Consultations, Surgery…), the ways you take money (Card, Cash, EFT), your VAT account, and your Accounts Receivable account.

The Chart of accounts panel already lists all of them, filled in with what your practice actually uses, so you can work down it. A category you have never sold does not appear and needs no answer.

Section	What it is	Example answer
System accounts	The controls every entry posts against.	`Accounts Receivable`, `NEW VAT CONTROL`
Revenue categories	One code per category in your price list.	Medication \| General → `114`
Payment types	Where each kind of payment lands.	Card → `Card Payments`

Careful

Two of them — Accounts Receivable and the VAT control — have no sensible default, so the export will not run until they are filled in. That is deliberate. A wrong account name does not fail on import; QuickBooks quietly creates a brand-new account with that name, and nobody notices until the accounts do not add up.

Tip

Two entries are worth knowing about. Adjustment is not money you received — it is a write-off, so it usually wants a bad-debt account rather than a bank one. And Account payment (PayFast) only appears if clients pay through the online portal; it is a separate bank account from your card machine.

Running a month#

Reports›Accounting export

A month with one category still unmapped. It balances, so the file is downloadable — the note names what is unresolved and what it is worth.

Step to the month you want with the arrows, or pick it from the month box.
Check the top of the screen. If there is nothing there, there is nothing to worry about.
Deal with anything it does say (see below).
Download .iif and send the file to your accountant.

The screen only speaks up when something needs you. A month that came out clean shows no banner at all — the figures are in the table and that is the whole answer. When a banner does appear it says one of two things:

It says	It means	Do
Balances, with questions.	The arithmetic is right, but some money went somewhere generic because it had no account code.	Either set the missing codes, or download it and tell your accountant to reallocate.
Does not balance.	Something is wrong that we will not guess at.	The download is switched off. See below.

Note

The last row, Accounts Receivable, is the figure your accountant cares about most. A positive number means clients owe you that much more at the end of the month than at the start — you charged more than you were paid. A negative one means the opposite: they paid their accounts down.

What the notes mean#

Anything the export could not answer for itself appears as a note above the table, with the amount at stake, so you can judge whether it matters.

Note	What happened	What to do
No account code for category…	You sold something in a category your accountant has not given you a code for. The money is in the journal, parked in the suspense account.	Open Chart of accounts, fill it in, and Save & refresh preview. The note disappears.
An entry has no type recorded	A very old ledger entry from before FastVet recorded what kind of charge it was.	Nothing, usually. It is in the journal and it balances — mention it to your accountant if it is a large amount.
Some entries use the legacy ‘D’ type	Old dispense records. They are treated as consultations.	Nothing.

Below the table there may be a collapsed line reading “N documents charged something the line items don't explain”. Most months will not have one at all. It lists visits and stays whose total does not match the items on them by enough to matter — usually a stay discount applied to the whole bill rather than to a line, or a visit that was edited after it was finished. Worth opening: the second of those is the one that catches people out.

Note

Hospital and boarding bills round down to the nearest 10c at discharge, so almost every stay differs from its line items by a few cents. That is by design and is not listed — it would bury the differences that do matter. Every cent of it still appears in the Discounts & rounding account, so the journal balances and nothing is hidden.

When it does not balance#

The download switches off, and it stays off. This is the one thing the report will not let you do, because a journal that does not balance cannot be fixed at your accountant's end — they would have to find the difference by hand, and they would bill you for the afternoon.

It is rare, and it nearly always means a document was changed after the month closed. Send us the month and the “out by” figure and we will trace it — do not retype the numbers into a spreadsheet to get around it.

About the file itself#


Format	IIF — the import format QuickBooks has used for decades.
Named	`Ledger-2026-07.iif`
Contains	One general journal entry per account, all dated the last day of the month.
Document number	Defaults to the year and month (`202607`). Change it in the box beside the download button if your accountant numbers journals their own way.

Note

Re-exporting the same month gives you the same file. If you fix a category code and export again, the totals move between accounts but the overall movement does not change — so if your accountant has already imported it, tell them, or they will import the month twice.

Only QuickBooks is supported at the moment. If your accountant uses Sage or Xero, tell us — the hard part is the same for all of them and only the file format differs.