Playbooks · Rules
One senior’s judgement, written down once, applied everywhere.
Most practices already have consistent house judgement. It just lives in one person’s head, or gets re-typed per client. Here’s the mechanics of turning that into something a whole firm actually reuses.
Three tiers
What actually belongs on each one.
Built-in defaults
General UK treatments that hold for almost any business: the kind of coding a new hire would get right without being told. A firm shouldn’t have to author these from a blank page; a reasonable starting set means day-one work isn’t entirely manual.
Firm rules
House policy that applies across every client: how this firm treats a particular software subscription, a particular type of bank charge, a payee that shows up on half the book. Write it once and every client benefits, not just the one you were looking at when you noticed the pattern.
Client exceptions
Where one client is different from the house view, such as a director who takes an unusual pattern of drawings, an industry-specific payee only they use. Recorded against the client rather than remembered by whoever handles their file, so the exception survives staff turnover.
The firing order
Client beats firm beats built-in, and the order matters.
More specific always wins over more general. A client exception exists because the house rule is wrong for that one client, so it has to override the house rule rather than fight it. A built-in default only ever fires when nothing more specific has an opinion. A firm can adopt one wholesale on day one and start overriding pieces of it immediately, without waiting to have written everything from scratch first.
When a client exception is really firm knowledge
The same "exception" written independently on two or three different clients is worth noticing. If a rule keeps getting reinvented per client, it’s probably describing something true about the firm’s house view, not something true about one client, worth promoting to a firm rule so the next client gets it for free.
Why retrospective sweeps change the maths
A rule that only applies going forward is worth writing when there’s a lot of the year still ahead. A rule that can recode transactions already imported is worth writing on the last client of the year too. The saving isn’t "time on what’s left", it’s the whole backlog of that payee, however far back it goes.
The mechanics above apply to any rule-based coding system. The firm rules page covers how Entrio’s three tiers, retrospective sweeps and 147 built-in UK defaults work specifically.
FAQ
Before you start writing rules.
Isn’t deciding what’s a firm rule versus a client exception itself an accounting judgement?
It’s a classification judgement, not an accounting one. You’re deciding how consistently a coding decision applies, not what the correct coding is. The accounting call (how to treat a particular payee or transaction) is still yours; the rule tier just decides how widely that call gets remembered and applied.
What happens when a firm rule and a client rule disagree?
The client rule wins. That’s what the exception level is for: a client who is different from house policy keeps their own answer instead of being overridden by something more general.
Do rules only apply going forward?
Not necessarily, if the system supports retrospective sweeps. A rule written in month twelve can recode everything already imported for that client, which changes the maths on whether a rule pays for itself: you’re not just saving time on what’s left.
How many rules does a typical firm end up with?
Usually far fewer than the number of clients suggests, because most payees repeat across a book. A firm with built-in UK defaults to start from is usually writing exceptions to those defaults, not building coverage from zero.
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