What your accountant actually gets.

transactions.csv

Every line the books report for the year, categorized, with the account, the merchant, the description, the amount, any flags, and which set of books actually paid it. That last column is how an accountant sees at a glance which lines are reimbursable.

profit_and_loss_by_month.csv

Income, every expense category as its own column, total expenses and net, month by month. A shape somebody can open in a spreadsheet and sort, rather than a rendered report they have to retype.

vendors.csv

Who you paid, how much, how many times, and how much of it went by bank transfer or check rather than card. The last column flags the possible 1099-NEC candidates.

owner_transfers.csv

Money in and money out between you and the business, with direction and counterparty. Owner contributions booked as income and owner draws booked as expenses are two of the most common ways a year comes out wrong, so they get their own file.

loans_interest_fees.csv

Loan payments, interest and fees, with the principal and interest split where it is known and where that split came from. Blank where nobody has said, rather than filled in with a guess.

open_items.csv

The things still unresolved when the package was built, each with the reason: uncategorized, flagged for review, or personal-looking on business books. This is the file that makes the package honest. Software that ships a clean package by hiding what it could not decide has moved the problem to April.

statements.csv

Every statement covering the year: the account, the period, opening and closing balances, whether it reconciled, and the checks themselves with what was expected and what was parsed. This is the proof the ledger is complete, and it is the answer to the only hard question an accountant asks about books they did not keep.

owner_asserted_deductions.csv

The write-offs you entered by hand, on their own, with the mileage rate applied to each trip and the method used for the home office. Present when there are any, and never added into a figure in any other file.

facts.json

The same figures in a machine-readable shape, including the counts, the reconciliation summary, the 1099 candidates and the owner-asserted totals under their own key.

README.md

The cover memo. What the year was, what is estimated and what is traced, what is still open, and which figures are owner asserted. Ezra drafts it, you can rewrite it, and your edit wins from then on.

The vendor file does the arithmetic. A vendor is flagged as a possible 1099-NEC candidate when you paid it 600 dollars or more by bank transfer or check across the year, with card payments excluded, because a card payment is reported by the processor and not by you. Payment processors themselves are excluded, and so are the categories Ezra never treats as 1099 territory: loan payments, utilities and home, housing, insurance, interest and fees, card payments and transfers.

An expense you paid personally for a business belongs in the business package, marked with who paid it, with the reimbursable total stated in the summary and in the memo. It is left out of the personal package, which states what it laid out for each business instead. Exactly one package reports any dollar. Why that is a data commitment and not a promise.

The statements, the reconciliation proof and the account list stay with the books whose accounts paid, because that is where those facts are true.

Upload the year. A bank connection asks for up to two years of history where the bank has it, and statements can be uploaded for any period at all. Ezra will reconcile what it can read, categorize it, and put the things it could not settle into the open items file rather than pretending they are settled. That is a materially better January than a folder, and it is not the same as having kept the books.

The reason to start now, mid-year, is not that the software is better in June. It is that the questions are answerable in June. A charge you cannot place in March is one you would have placed in a second last week.