Stop spending qualified hours cleaning up statements. Your musician, DJ and creative clients arrive with a reviewed Excel accountant pack and a row-level CSV of every included income and expense, instead of a carrier bag of PDFs: first-pass sorted, every included decision visible. You keep the judgement and the client relationship.
Each export is a four-tab Excel accountant pack: a cover with reconciliation and review flags, filterable Expenses and Income tables, and an SA103 category guide. A matching row-level CSV of the kept business transactions comes with it for practice imports. It supports selected UK tax years and standard MTD update periods beginning on 6 April. Calendar update periods are not yet supported.
Cratebooks runs an automated pre-export sense-check and asks clients to confirm that all accounts, off-bank records and the correct trade are included. It does not replace professional judgement.
The accountant pack contains an Excel summary workbook plus a row-level CSV of the kept business transactions. Here is what a period looks like: every included line labelled, claim shares explicit, uncategorised claims surfaced, review flags visible and category totals summarised.
| Date | Merchant | Category | Amount | Claim % | Claimed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 04 May | Pioneer DJ | Equipment | £420.00 | 100% | £420.00 |
| 09 May | Pirate Studios | Studio | £46.00 | 100% | £46.00 |
| 15 May | Shell | Vehicle | £60.00 | 50% | £30.00 |
| 22 May | Thomann review | Equipment | £1,200.00 | 100% | £1,200.00 |
| 28 May | Trainline | Travel | £44.30 | 100% | £44.30 |
No. Cratebooks never receives bank login credentials. PDF and CSV statement files are read in the client's browser; only the extracted transaction records are saved to their account.
Cratebooks makes the first pass; your client reviews and confirms every kept transaction. The export shows the outcome per row: category, claim share and any review flag. Nothing is silently claimed.
In the workbook, yes: change a category or claim percentage on the ledger tabs and the Summary and SA103 guide recalculate. The filing cells stay as exported, so if the source needs correcting for HMRC, your client amends it in Cratebooks and re-exports in minutes. Re-importing the same statement is safe and deduplicated.
The export records the accounting basis, tax period, review notes and your client's completeness confirmations. Every row shows the decision made on it, plus the original statement description and source account alongside the cleaned merchant name. What you receive is what they confirmed.
Before export, your client confirms all accounts and off-bank records are included for the trade. The automated check flags duplicates, cash and mixed-use claims, but it cannot see an account it was never given. The confirmation is written evidence of what your client told us was complete. It does not, and cannot, displace your own professional or contractual responsibilities.
Cratebooks prepares the client's records before they enter your normal workflow; the pack arrives as ordinary Excel and CSV files, with no practice migration and nothing to roll out. It is built to be worked from: the Summary, category totals, SA103 guide and the MTD filing tab all recalculate from the ledger tabs, categories are dropdowns and claim percentages are editable, so adjustments behave like any other working paper. For cash-basis clients the MTD filing tab keeps every SA103F figure at a fixed cell address, so a bridging template added to the same workbook can reference them by formula, which is designed to support HMRC's digital-link requirements. Confirm the treatment for your practice. Two boundaries to know: figures are checked at export, and changes made after that, plus anything filed from them, sit with whoever makes them; and workbook edits do not flow back into Cratebooks, so a correction that should persist into future exports needs making there too.
We work with a small number of practices at a time, hands-on. Your first clients are set up free, the founder walks you and each client through the handover personally, and practice terms are agreed before anything is charged.
One completed update period or eight weeks, whichever comes first. Nothing renews automatically; you decide what happens next.
Start with a genuinely messy creative client, not a tidy one, and tell us plainly what the handover gets right and wrong. If the first client earns a second, we are doing our job.
Cratebooks costs your client £39 a year and reduces the transaction-sorting work before the file reaches you. You keep the judgement, adjustments and filing work.
Work with usWant to review the artefact first? Download the sample export: a categorised Excel workbook with an SA103F guide, plus sample data.