Do you keep the books for dozens or hundreds of clients and are you considering a switch to ABRA Flexi? This guide is written from the perspective of an accounting firm owner, chief accountant, or managing director. It doesn't cover how to post a single invoice. It covers everything you need to decide and set up before you put your first clients and your whole team into the system.

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

Before you start setting anything up, it's worth aligning your expectations. ABRA Flexi is a full-featured business system for individual accounting entities, with a layer on top for managing multiple companies.

What you can rely on in Flexi:

What to plan for in advance:

The answers to the following questions determine what your license will look like and how much work awaits you. We recommend going through them before you create 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: it manages dozens of companies to which the whole team has access, and some clients want to view or work in their own data. You can find the complete price list and license terms on the plan page and in the license terms; a detailed description of the screens is in the guide to the accounting firm plan.

The following diagram shows how the individual license levels connect. Below the firm license are clients as separate sublicenses, below each client are one or more companies, and specific users are assigned to the companies. This structure determines who can access which data and what you pay for.

A standard license is one company or a group of companies of a single customer with a single number of accesses. The accounting firm plan adds a second level above the license — clients:

The accounting firm license automatically includes API access in the price. You and your clients can therefore start using the API right away.

The plan 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 monitor both consumption and the agreed limit in the Licenses and Subscription section on the API Usage tab.

A client is a sublicense subordinate to your firm's license. You always create one, whether or not the client needs their own access to Flexi — if they don't, choose the no access edition. Each client has a name, company ID (IČ), and contact email; these three details are required for the sublicense to be created.

What's essential to know about clients:

The fee is tied to an active company — specifically CZK 95 per active company. Therefore, archive companies that you don't need in operation. Archiving means "putting to sleep": the company disappears from the company selection, but the data is preserved and the company 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 (the gear icon at the bottom left) on the Company Management tab. The desktop application can archive and delete only one company at a time, directly in the company selection after login.

Firms that used Flexi before the plan was introduced went through a one-time transition: in the Company Management agenda, they downloaded an Excel template with a list of companies, filled in the client, their company ID, the license edition, and the contact email for each company, and uploaded the file back. Users were moved automatically. The procedure and solutions to the most common issues are described in the guide to the transition to the new plan, and a video tutorial is also available.

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

You create a new company with the Create new company button. On the Clients tab, you also choose whether you are creating the company for the firm or for a specific client. A step-by-step procedure, including the individual settings tabs, is described in the guide to creating a new company.

Details you fill in right at the start:

If you create clients with similar settings, there's no point in filling in everything again for each one. Build one company as a template and restore new clients from it. The procedure is described in the guide to the template for creating new companies.

You can generate a backup of any company you have access to directly from the company selection — by clicking the name of the open company or via the user profile and the My companies option. On the company's row, choose More functions and Back up data; a file with the extension .winstrom-backup is downloaded. Restore takes place in the same selection using the Restore data button. Details are described in the guides to company backup and to restoring a company from a backup.

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

In the web interface, you switch between clients by clicking the name of the currently open company, which opens the company selection. You can filter the list by typing — the filter is case-insensitive and diacritics-insensitive, and the search text can be anywhere in the name. With dozens of clients, this is the fastest way.

Access setup is the most sensitive topic in an accounting firm. It must simultaneously hold that each accountant can reach their own clients, cannot reach others', and that a client sees only themselves. In Flexi, this is handled by three independent layers: access type, user role, and data visibility rights.

You manage users in the web interface in the User Overview agenda, where you can see all users across the entire license, the number of used and free accesses, and from where you can move them between clients and the firm license. A detailed description of both interfaces can be found in the guide on how to work with users.

You can find out how many accesses you have active and how many of them are assigned in the Licenses and Subscription agenda, where you can also add accesses yourself. Additional overviews are offered by the article on users consuming the license 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 in them. Several roles are predefined — warehouse clerk, accountant, payroll accountant, administrator — and they are immutable and cannot be deleted. You create your own role by copying and editing the nearest 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 won't see it at all. Access can be refined down to individual functions — for example, allowing invoice creation but prohibiting their editing and deletion, or hiding purchase prices.

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

What can be restricted by visibility rights:

Neither a role nor visibility rights are sufficient on their own — what matters is the client structure and the user's assignment. Proceed as follows:

Users can also be managed programmatically — if you need to create accesses from your own system, see user management via API.

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

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

Even a newly created empty company already has the most commonly used analytical accounts in its chart of accounts, and these are also used in the preset document types and posting rules. You don't have to use them — you can create your own analytical accounts at any time. Checking and supplementing the chart is described in a separate guide.

You can also populate the chart by importing from Excel, which speeds up your work compared to manual entry.

A posting rule determines which accounts a document is posted to. A document type uses the rule and adds further presets to it. It is precisely this pair that carries your methodology. The procedure is described in the guide to posting rules and their use in document types, and complemented by document posting presets.

For clients with a large number of recurring bank movements — account maintenance fees, interest, regular payments — posting by rules pays off. A rule contains conditions on values in a bank movement and a set of fields that are filled in when the conditions are met.

One of the potentially risky moments an accounting firm may face is taking over a client. Flexi has a detailed series on this, Accounting transition to ABRA Flexi, which guides you through sixteen steps from creating a company to HR. The following summary shows what's essential for a firm.

A transition at the start of a new accounting period is simpler. A transition mid-period is feasible but more laborious — mainly for unpaid receivables, payables, and advances. The article on migrating data from another system discusses this in more detail.

The following steps are the core of the takeover. Each has its own chapter in the series mentioned above, and for many of them there is also a web interface variant.

Three mistakes that recur most often during takeovers:

Transferring a larger client's books manually makes no sense. Flexi supports imports via Excel and XML, and for Pohoda it has its own migration tool. You can find an overview of all paths, including partner solutions, in the article on options for migrating from Pohoda.

What the migration from Pohoda transfers:

What the migration does not transfer:

Other systems are handled via import from Excel. The web interface goes further in imports than the desktop application: it helps with column mapping, lets you add fields that aren't in the file, and remembers the mapping on a second import. The article on smart imports describes the extended options.

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

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

If documents arrive as PDFs, the web interface can extract them by clicking. In the detail of a new received invoice, you turn on the form variant With attachment preview, drag the PDF into the field, and by clicking in the document step by step, you transfer individual values into the form fields. A processed value is marked with a green indicator.

If you receive a list of documents in a spreadsheet from a client, the fastest route is import from Excel. The web interface goes further in imports than the desktop application: it helps with column mapping, lets you fill in fields that aren't in the file at all — such as the document type — and remembers the mapping for the next import.

How to prepare the right file:

Further options — sources of allowed values, required fields, and checks that Flexi performs before completing an import — are described in the article on smart imports. You can find an overview of individual records and their specifics 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 to loading a statement and creating a payment order, followed by the article on matching movements with documents. Manual downloading, however, is precisely the type of work that pays off to automate in a firm.

The automatic matching function matches movements to documents by variable symbol and amount. If matching doesn't work reliably for a client, check these two values first — they are the most common cause.

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

If you process payments 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 are paid. The procedure is described in the guide to received invoices.

If a client has an e-shop, a point-of-sale system, or their own application, documents don't have to come through you at all — they write themselves into Flexi. The basics are described in the guide on how to use the API. An API-type user cannot log in to the application; it serves only to authenticate background data transfers and consumes a separate paid API access.

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

The following checklist is not a mandatory procedure, but a proven order of steps. Go through it for each client, and you'll catch most discrepancies before they get into a statement.

For an accounting firm, outputs are not an add-on but the main working tool — both for control and for presentation. The entry point is the accounting outputs hub and the general description of the module in the article Accounting outputs. For each output, the following overview tells you what it is for, where it takes its data from, and where people most often get confused.

Accounting outputs are available in both the web interface and the desktop application and work on the same data.

A chronological record of all posted documents. It is the first output to look at when something doesn't add up — the general journal shows what was actually posted and what remained unposted. In the web interface, a simplified variant is also available, and from each row you can click through to the source document.

A detailed breakdown of turnovers by individual accounts for a selected period — essentially the journal sorted by account. It is used when tracing what specifically makes up the turnover on an account. The guides for the web interface and for the desktop application describe the same output.

A summary of opening balances, turnovers, and closing balances of all accounts. It is the fastest check of whether the client's books "hold together". It is described for the web interface as well as the desktop.

Two discrepancies accountants ask about most often:

A systematic record by account with opening balances, turnovers, and balances — a mandatory part of accounting documentation. You can find a description in the article General ledger.

An overview of balances as of a given date. It is used to check continuity between periods and as a basis for opening balances. Besides the basic description of account balances, two related articles are useful to know: how to work with balances from the previous period and how active and passive accounts by result behave in the output.

An overview of unmatched receivables and payables on balance-tracked accounts. For a firm, it is one of the most sensitive outputs, because it directly shows what the client owes and what is owed to them. You can find a detailed description in the article Balance.

What to watch out for with the balance:

Whereas the balance shows the current accounting status, the payment status as of a date offers a retrospective view — what receivables and payables looked like on any given day. This comes in handy when preparing financial statements and when responding to a tax office inquiry. The output doesn't deal with the accounting side — it "doesn't care" how a document is posted.

You monitor overdue documents in the web interface through the overview of overdue receivables and payables, and in the desktop application through a similar output. A special chapter is payables six months past due, for which an obligation to return the VAT deduction arises; there is also a variant with a reduction coefficient.

The balance sheet is compiled based on the assignment of accounts to asset and liability lines, which is derived from the account type. In the web interface, it is described in the article Accounting balance sheet, and in the desktop application in Balance sheet.

The income statement is compiled from expense and revenue accounts. A guide exists for the web interface as well as for the desktop application. Starting with the 2024 accounting period, the statement includes a net turnover figure — for clients near the threshold of an accounting entity category, this is essential information.

The cash flow statement is a mandatory part of financial statements for accounting entities that prepare them in full. Flexi offers it in two forms: as the Cash flow statement accounting output and as a chart on the dashboard with an outlook into future periods based on invoice due dates.

Supplementary reports to the balance sheet and income statement that break individual lines down into specific accounts. They are used when tracing what a statement line consists of. They are available for the asset and liability breakdown and the expense and revenue breakdown in the web interface, and equivalents exist in the desktop application too — assets and liabilities, expenses and revenues.

Besides the statutory statements, you will also use several operational reports:

Standard reports cover statutory obligations and routine checks. A report in the format a specific client is used to, however, they usually won't offer.

You have three ways to handle this:

The overall procedure from entering a document to submitting the statement is described by the wizard for the VAT return and control statement; for the desktop application, there is a similar wizard.

VAT source data fulfills a legislative obligation and at the same time serves as a control tool. It reveals discrepancies before the return is prepared — for example, a missing control statement line on a document that enters VAT.

When a document enters the return:

You prepare the return in the Accounting Outputs agenda — VAT return. You select the period, the type of return, and the output format: PDF for checking, or XML for submission to the tax authority portal.

The coefficient for calculating the proportional part of the deduction is preset to the value 100. If a client applies a reduced deduction, you need to select on the received invoice a VAT line whose name contains the abbreviation KR. Flexi calculates the settlement coefficient when preparing the return for the last period of the year and uses it for the following year as an advance coefficient.

You prepare the control statement similarly to the return — you can find a description in the article Control statement. A response to a tax administrator's summons deserves special attention, because it is easy to choose the wrong variant.

The procedure is discussed in the article on the subsequent control statement. Where to find the reference number of the summons is described in a separate guide; if you are unable to export the statement, see the most common causes of XML export errors.

It is filed for supplies to other member states. A guide exists for the web interface as well as for the desktop application.

The annual routine is the most demanding period for a firm, because the same procedure repeats for each client. You can find a summary for the web interface in the article on year-end closing, and the detailed procedure in the closing guide and in the wizard for closing the period and transferring data.

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

The closing itself is performed by the function for initializing the next accounting period. It closes the given period and transfers account balances to the next year as opening balances. In the settings, you choose closing accounts and several additional operations:

After submitting the return, it is advisable to lock the period so that nobody changes anything in it. Period locking serves this purpose, as does locking individual records.

Flexi does not have a separate output for income tax. The balance sheet and the profit and loss statement serve as the basis — more details in the article on corporate income tax.

If you also serve Slovak accounting entities, keep in mind that not only the rates differ, but also the structure of the statements and some control mechanisms. You choose the legislation when creating a company and it cannot be changed afterwards — see the overview of supported organization types.

What to go through for your first Slovak client:

For the personal data you work with in Flexi, the division of roles is clear: the data controller is your firm, or the client, and ABRA Flexi is the processor — we merely store the data. The decision about what happens to the data therefore lies with you.

Flexi has its own register of personal data processing purposes with predefined purposes and the option to create your own. For each purpose, you record the legal basis, relationship type, responsible person, nature of the data, occurrence in agendas, and validity. Creating and cancelling purposes is described in a separate guide, and a general overview is in the introduction to GDPR in Flexi.

A client leaving has both a technical and a legal side. Recommended order of steps:

The number of companies is not limited. You pay for companies that are active — specifically CZK 95 per active company. Archive companies you don't work with; the fee does not apply to archived ones, and their data remains preserved.

Yes. The usual relationship is one client = one company, but several branches or subsidiaries can be placed under one client. They all then share the same license edition.

No, provided you assign her only to the clients she is to process. Each client's companies and users are in an isolated environment, and a user cannot reach another client's data even by accident. Access to all companies across clients is available only with the Accounting firm access type.

Yes, and it's free. Users with read access do not consume a paid access and you can have an unlimited number of them. It fits exactly the situation where a managing director wants to see the numbers but doesn't need to write to the books.

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

No. Both are chosen when the company is created and cannot be changed afterwards, not even by a custom modification. If you discover a mistake, you need to create a new company and transfer the data into it. That is why you should verify both values carefully before creating the company.

It isn't, it's just more laborious than a transition at the start of a new period — mainly for unpaid receivables, payables, and advances. It's important to close a full month in the original system and not migrate in the middle of a month, especially because of VAT.

Accounting outputs are available in both interfaces and work on the same data. Only payroll and HR are truly desktop-only; the Employees and Assets modules are displayed in the web interface but cannot be edited. If a firm processes payroll, the payroll accountant will always need the desktop application.

Almost always because of unposted documents. Compare both reports, find the document that is in the trial balance but missing from the movements, and post it. Unposted documents also do not enter the balance sheet, account balances, or profit and loss statement.

Most often in partially matched payments — a document must have the Matched flag. The second usual cause is the matching symbol by which the balance is grouped. If the balance-tracked account balances to zero, the accounting is fine and only the grouping is broken.

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

A saved return serves only as a basis for a possible supplementary return and cannot be displayed anywhere. We therefore recommend saving only the final version for a given period and archiving the PDF outside the system. To correct a submitted return, choose a corrective regular return or a supplementary return depending on the deadline.

Yes, and it's safe. Initialization can be repeated at any time and closing operations will not be duplicated. Without repeating it, the correction would not carry over into the opening balances of the following period.

You have three options: a user query over SQL in the Premium edition, a configurable print report editable directly in the web interface, or a custom print report. We'll gladly prepare a report for you as a custom solution — request a quote.