Do you handle accounting for dozens or hundreds of clients and are considering switching to ABRA Flexi? This guide is written from the perspective of an accounting firm owner, head accountant, or managing director. It doesn't cover how to book a single invoice, but rather everything you need to decide and configure before rolling the system out to your first clients and your whole team.

An accounting firm deals with things in Flexi that a single-company customer never encounters: a licensing model built around clients, data separation between clients, unified accounting methodology across companies, taking over accounting from a predecessor, and offboarding a client. These are exactly the topics covered in this first part.

Before you start configuring anything, it's worth aligning expectations. ABRA Flexi is a full-fledged business system for individual accounting entities, with a management layer on top for handling multiple companies.

What you can rely on in Flexi:

What to plan for in advance:

The answers to the following questions will determine what your license looks like and how much work lies ahead. We recommend going through them before setting up your first client company — some decisions are difficult, or impossible, to change later.

Accounting firms have their own pricing model, based on how a firm actually works with the system: managing dozens of companies that the entire team can access, while some clients want to view or work in their own data. You'll find the complete price list and license terms on the tariff page and in the license terms; a detailed screen-by-screen description is available in the guide to the accounting firm tariff.

The following diagram shows how the individual license levels relate to each other. Below the firm's license are clients as separate sublicenses, below each client one or more companies, and specific users are assigned to those companies. This structure determines who gets access to which data and what you're paying for.

A standard license is one company or a group of companies belonging to a single customer, with a single number of access seats. The accounting firm tariff adds a second layer on top of the license — clients:

The accounting firm license automatically includes API access at no extra cost. So both you and your clients can start using the API right away.

The tariff also includes an increased limit of 50,000 API requests per day. For comparison, the standard editions include 5,000 requests for Basic, 10,000 for Business, and 20,000 for Premium. You can track both usage and the agreed limit in the License and Subscription section, on the API Usage tab.

A client represents a sublicense subordinate to your firm's license. You always set one up, whether or not the client needs their own access to Flexi — in the latter case, choose the no access option. Each client has a name, a company ID, and a contact email; these three pieces of information are required in order to create a sublicense.

Key things to know about clients:

The fee applies to active companies — specifically CZK 95 per active company. Archive companies that you don't need in operation. Archiving means "putting to sleep": the company disappears from the company selection, but its data is preserved and it can be reactivated at any time.

What typically belongs in the archive:

Only the web interface can archive and delete companies in bulk, in Settings (gear icon at the bottom left), on the Company Management tab. The desktop application can archive or remove companies only one at a time, directly from the company selection screen after logging in.

Firms that used Flexi before the tariff was introduced went through a one-time transition: in the Company Management section, they downloaded an Excel template listing their companies, added the client, company ID, license edition, and contact email for each company, and uploaded the file back. Users were moved automatically. The process and solutions to the most common issues are described in the guide to switching to the new tariff; a video guide is also available.

Company Management is your main hub within the tariff. You'll find it in the web interface under Settings, via the gear icon at the bottom left. The More functions button next to each company offers a company backup, moving between licenses and sublicenses, deletion, archiving, or reactivation.

Set up a new company using the Create new company button. On the Clients tab, you also choose whether you're creating the company for the firm or for a specific client. The step-by-step process, including each setting tab, is described in the guide on setting up a new company.

Information you fill in right at the start:

If you're setting up clients with similar configurations, it makes no sense to fill everything in again each time. Build one company as a template and restore new clients from it. The process is described in the guide to using a template for setting up new companies.

You can generate a backup of any company you have access to directly from the company selection screen — by clicking the name of the currently open company, or via the user profile and the My companies option. In the row for the company, select More functions and Back up data; a file with the extension .winstrom-backup will be downloaded. Restoring works the same way, using the Restore data button in the same selection screen. Details are described in the guide to backing up a company and to restoring a company from a backup.

If you run Flexi in the cloud, we create backups automatically every night at midnight and keep them for three months. You can download them yourself; older backups marked as archived take a moment to prepare before downloading.

You switch between clients in the web interface by clicking the name of the currently open company, which brings up the company selection screen. The list can be filtered by typing — the filter is not case-sensitive, ignores diacritics, and the search term can appear anywhere within the name. With dozens of clients, this is the fastest way to navigate.

Access configuration is the most sensitive topic in an accounting firm. You need all of the following to hold true simultaneously: each accountant can reach their own clients, cannot reach others' clients, and a client can only see themselves. Flexi handles this through three independent layers: access type, user role, and data visibility rights.

You manage users in the web interface in the User Overview section, where you can see all users across the entire license, the number of used and free access seats, and move users between clients and the firm's license. A detailed description of both interfaces can be found in the guide on working with users.

You can see how many access seats you have active and how many are assigned in the License and Subscription section, where you can also add seats yourself. Additional overviews are provided in the article on users consuming license seats and the guide on how to find out which companies a user has access to.

A role determines which modules and records a user can see and what they can do within them. Several roles are predefined — warehouse worker, accountant, payroll accountant, administrator — and these are fixed and cannot be deleted. You create a custom role by copying and modifying the closest standard role; this is significantly faster than building one from scratch. Details are described in the article on user roles.

A role determines whether a user has full access to a given section, read-only access, or no visibility at all. Access can be fine-tuned down to individual functions — for example, allowing the creation of invoices while forbidding their editing and deletion, or hiding purchase prices.

Roles handle access horizontally, by module. Data visibility rights handle access vertically, within the records a user can see. The difference between these two layers is explained in a separate article on roles vs. advanced rights.

What can be restricted using visibility rights:

Roles and visibility rights alone aren't enough — it's the client structure and user assignment that determine this. Follow these steps:

Users can also be managed programmatically — if you need to create access from your own system, see managing users via API.

For an accounting firm holding data for dozens of entities, two-factor authentication is more of a requirement than an option. Flexi supports it based on one-time codes and works in the cloud, on your own server, and in a local installation.

A unified methodology across clients is what separates a well-configured firm from a collection of randomly configured companies. The goal is for an accountant, when switching to any given client, to find the same sub-accounts, the same document types, and the same posting templates.

Even a newly created, empty company already has the most commonly used sub-accounts set up in the chart of accounts, which are also used in the preconfigured document types and posting templates. You don't have to use them — you can create your own sub-accounts at any time. Checking and completing the chart is described in a separate guide.

You can also populate the chart via Excel import, saving time compared to manual entry.

A posting template determines which accounts a document is posted to. A document type uses a posting template and adds further presets on top of it. This pair is what carries your methodology. The process is described in the guide to posting templates and their use in document types, complemented by document posting presets.

For clients with a large number of recurring bank transactions — account maintenance fees, interest, regular payments — rule-based posting is worth setting up. A rule contains conditions on values within a bank transaction and a set of fields to be filled in automatically when they're met.

Taking over a client is one of the potentially risky moments an accounting firm may face. Flexi has an in-depth series called Accounting Transition to ABRA Flexi, which walks through sixteen steps from setting up the company all the way to HR. The summary below highlights what matters most for a firm.

Switching at the start of a new accounting period is simpler. Switching mid-period is manageable but more work — especially for unpaid receivables, payables, and advances. This is covered in more detail in the article on migrating data from another system.

The following steps form the core of the takeover. Each one has its own chapter in the series mentioned above, and many also have a web-interface variant.

The three most common mistakes during a takeover:

Manually transferring accounting data for a larger client makes little sense. Flexi supports imports via Excel and XML, and has a dedicated migration tool for Pohoda. An overview of all approaches, including partner solutions, can be found in the article on migration options from Pohoda.

What the migration from Pohoda will transfer:

What the migration will not transfer:

Other systems are handled via Excel import. The web interface is more advanced than the desktop app when it comes to imports: it helps map columns, lets you add fields that aren't in the file, and remembers the mapping for the next import. Advanced options are described in the article on smart imports.

Retyping paper documents is the biggest time sink in an accounting firm. Flexi offers several ways to avoid it; the best one depends on the form in which you receive documents from your client.

ISDOC is a Czech e-invoicing standard, and Flexi supports it in both directions. You can import a received invoice in the desktop app via Tools → Import → Import ISDOC e-invoice, or directly from the received invoices list. In the web interface, ISDOC is among the supported formats for importing received invoices.

If documents arrive as PDF files, the web interface can extract them via clicking. In the detail of a new received invoice, switch on the With attachment preview form variant, drag the PDF into the field, and by clicking through the document, transfer individual values into the form fields one at a time. A processed field is marked with a green checkmark.

If you receive a document list from your client as a spreadsheet, the fastest way to handle it is via Excel import. The web interface is more advanced than the desktop app for imports: it helps map columns, lets you fill in fields that aren't even in the file — such as document type — and remembers the mapping for future imports.

How to prepare the right file:

Additional options — sources of allowed values, mandatory fields, and the checks Flexi performs before completing an import — are described in the article on smart imports. An overview of individual records and their specifics can be found in the introduction to Excel imports.

A bank statement can be loaded manually from a file — the procedure for the web interface is described in the guide on loading a statement and creating a payment order, followed by the article on matching transactions to documents. Manual downloading, however, is exactly the kind of work that's worth automating in a firm.

The automatic matching function matches transactions to documents based on the variable symbol and amount. If matching isn't working reliably for a particular client, check these two values first — they're the most common cause of issues.

The most effective option is an automatic bank account connection. After a one-time setup, transactions are downloaded every hour throughout the day directly into the Bank record, and automatic matching of both incoming and outgoing payments can also be enabled.

If you handle payment processing for a client, you'll appreciate the Sign for payment function. When approval is active, an unsigned invoice cannot be included in a payment order, so only approved documents get paid. The process is described in the guide to received invoices.

If a client has an e-shop, a POS system, or their own application, documents don't need to go through you at all — they can be written into Flexi automatically. The basics are described in the guide, how to use the API. An API-type user doesn't log into the application, it's used only to authenticate background data transfers, and it consumes a separate paid API access seat.

If your client has an e-shop and you want to set it up, we recommend reviewing this guide. The technical side of the connection itself is covered in another guide.

The following checklist isn't a mandatory procedure, but a proven order of steps. Go through it for each client, and you'll catch most discrepancies before they end up in a report.

For an accounting firm, outputs aren't a bonus feature — they're the main working tool, both for checking data and presenting it. The starting point is the accounting outputs hub and the general description of the module in the article Accounting Outputs. The overview below explains, for each output, what it's for, where the data comes from, and where mistakes most commonly occur.

Accounting outputs are available in both the web interface and the desktop app, and work with the same underlying data.

A chronological record of every posted document. It's the first output to check when something doesn't add up — the accounting journal shows what was actually posted and what remains unposted. The web interface also offers a simplified variant, and each row links directly to its source document.

A detailed breakdown of turnover by individual account for a selected period — essentially the journal sorted by account. It's used to trace exactly what makes up an account's turnover. Guides for both the web interface and the desktop application describe the same output.

A summary of opening balances, turnover, and closing balances for all accounts. It's the fastest way to check whether a client's accounting "adds up." Described for both the web interface and the desktop app.

The two discrepancies accountants ask about most often:

A systematic record by account showing opening balances, turnover, and closing balances — a mandatory part of accounting documentation. See the article General Ledger for details.

An overview of balances as of a given date. Used to check continuity between periods and as a basis for opening balances. Besides the basic description of account balances, it's worth knowing two related articles: how balances from the previous period are handled, and how accounts active or passive based on the result appear in this output.

An overview of unmatched receivables and payables on open-item accounts. For a firm, this is one of the most sensitive outputs, as it directly shows what the client owes and is owed. A detailed description can be found in the article Open-Item Balance.

What to watch out for with the open-item balance:

While the open-item balance shows the current accounting state, payment status as of a date offers a retrospective view — how receivables and payables looked on any given day. This is useful when preparing a closing and when responding to a tax authority inquiry. This output doesn't deal with the accounting side of things — it doesn't "care" how a document was posted.

You can track overdue documents in the web interface via the overview of overdue receivables and payables, and in the desktop app via a similar output. A special case is payables six months past due, which trigger an obligation to reverse the VAT deduction; there's also a variant with a reduction coefficient.

The balance sheet is compiled based on how accounts are assigned to asset and liability lines, which in turn depends on the account type. In the web interface, it's described in the article Balance Sheet; in the desktop app, in Balance Sheet.

The P&L is compiled from expense and revenue accounts. A guide exists for both the web interface and the desktop app. Starting with the 2024 accounting period, the report added a net turnover figure — an important piece of information for clients close to the threshold between accounting entity categories.

The cash flow statement is a mandatory part of the closing for accounting entities that prepare it in full scope. Flexi offers it in two forms: as the Cash Flow Statement accounting output, and as a dashboard chart with a forward-looking view based on invoice due dates.

Supplementary reports for the balance sheet and P&L that break down each line into the underlying accounts. Used when tracing what makes up a particular report line. Available for the list of assets and liabilities and the list of expenses and revenues in the web interface; equivalents exist in the desktop app too — assets and liabilities, expenses and revenues.

Beyond statutory reports, several operational reports come in handy:

Standard reports cover statutory obligations and routine checks. However, they usually don't offer a report in the exact format a particular client is used to.

You have three ways to handle that:

A complete walkthrough from entering a document to submitting a report is described in the guide to the VAT return and control statement; a similar guide exists for the desktop application.

VAT documentation both fulfills a legal obligation and serves as a control tool. It catches discrepancies before the return is compiled — for example, a missing control statement line for a document that should be included in VAT.

When a document enters the return:

You compile the return in the Accounting Outputs section — VAT Return. Select the period, the type of return, and the output format: PDF for review, or XML for submission to the tax authority's portal.

The coefficient for calculating the proportional deduction is preset to 100. If a client applies a reduced deduction, you must select the VAT line on the received invoice that includes the abbreviation KR in its name. Flexi calculates the settlement coefficient when compiling the return for the last period of the year, and uses it as an advance coefficient for the following year.

You compile the control statement in a similar way to the return — see the article Control Statement. Special care is needed when responding to a notice from the tax administrator, since it's easy to pick the wrong option.

The process is covered in the article on the follow-up control statement. Where to find the notice's reference number is described in a dedicated guide; if the statement won't export, check the most common causes of XML export errors.

Filed for supplies to other EU member states. A guide exists for both the web interface and the desktop application.

The annual routine is the most demanding period for a firm, since the same process repeats for every client. A summary for the web interface is available in the article on the year-end closing, with a detailed procedure in the closing guide and the guide to closing a period and carrying data forward.

You create a new period in the accounting periods list using the New button. You fill in the abbreviation, validity range, and year code for document series. The process for the web interface is described in the article on closing a period.

The actual closing is performed by the next accounting period initialization function. It closes the given period and carries account balances forward into the next year as opening balances. In the settings, you choose the closing accounts and several optional operations:

Once returns have been submitted, it's a good idea to lock the period so nothing more can be changed. This is done using period locking, or locking individual records.

Flexi does not have a dedicated output for income tax. The underlying documents are the balance sheet and profit and loss statement — more details in the article on corporate income tax.

If you also serve Slovak accounting entities, expect not just different rates, but also different report structures and control mechanisms. You choose the legislation when setting up the company, and it cannot be changed later — see the overview of supported organization types.

What to review with your first Slovak client:

For the personal data you work with in Flexi, the division of roles is clear: your firm, or the client, is the data controller, while ABRA Flexi is the processor — we only store the data. Decisions about what happens to the data are therefore up to you.

Flexi has its own registry of personal data processing purposes, with predefined purposes and the option to create your own. For each purpose, you record the legal basis, type of relationship, responsible person, nature of the data, where it appears across records, and validity. Creating and deleting purposes is described in a dedicated guide, and a general overview is in the introduction to GDPR in Flexi.

A client's departure has both a technical and a legal side. Recommended order of steps:

There's no limit on the number of companies. You pay for companies that are active — specifically CZK 95 per active company. Archive companies you're not working with; the fee doesn't apply to archived companies, and their data is preserved.

Yes. The usual relationship is one client = one company, but a single client can also include several branches or subsidiaries. They then all share the same license edition.

No, as long as you assign them only to the clients they're supposed to handle. Each client's companies and users are in an isolated environment, and a user cannot accidentally access another client's data. Only the Accounting Firm access type has access to all companies across clients.

Yes, and it's free. Users with read-only access don't consume a paid seat, and you can have an unlimited number of them. It's a perfect fit for cases where a managing director wants to see the figures but shouldn't be entering data into the accounting.

Not directly in bulk across companies, but there are two practical approaches: build a template company and restore new clients from it, or export the chart of accounts and posting templates to Excel and import them for other clients.

No. Both are chosen when the company is set up and cannot be changed later, even with a custom modification. If you find an error, you need to create a new company and transfer the data into it. So verify both values carefully before setting things up.

No, it's just more work than switching at the start of a new period — especially for unpaid receivables, payables, and advances. It's important to close the full month in the original system and not migrate in the middle of a month, particularly because of VAT.

Accounting outputs are available in both interfaces and work with the same data. The only things truly limited to the desktop app are payroll and HR; the Employees and Assets modules are displayed by the web interface but cannot be edited there. If your firm handles payroll, your payroll accountant will always need the desktop app.

Almost always because of unposted documents. Compare both reports, find the document present in the trial balance but missing from account transactions, and post it. Unposted documents also don't feed into the balance sheet, account balances, or profit and loss statement.

Most often it's due to partially matched payments — a document must have the Matched flag. The second common cause is the matching symbol used for grouping the open-item balance. If the open-item account nets to zero, the accounting itself is fine and only the grouping is off.

Only if they have the Premium edition and their role has access to user queries enabled. Firm users work in the Premium edition, so cash flow is available to them; a client on Basic or Business does not have it.

A saved return only serves as a basis for a potential supplementary return and cannot be viewed anywhere. That's why we recommend saving only the final version for a given period and archiving the PDF separately outside the system. To correct a submitted return, depending on the deadline, choose either a corrective regular return or a supplementary return.

Yes, and it's safe to do so. Initialization can be repeated at any time without duplicating closing operations. Without rerunning it, the fix wouldn't be reflected in the opening balances of the following period.

You have three options: an SQL-based user query in the Premium edition, a configurable print report editable directly in the web interface, or a fully custom print report. We're happy to build a report for you — just ask us for a quote.