CharteredPro Product Manual

The comprehensive guide to using CharteredPro — the Nigeria-first professional operating system for accountancy, audit, tax, compliance, and practice management.

1. Introduction

CharteredPro is a professional multi-tenant SaaS platform designed for Nigerian Chartered Accountants, accounting firms, audit firms, tax practitioners, corporate accountants, finance managers, CFOs, internal auditors, trainees, and accounting students.

It is not a generic accounting application. It is a professional command centre that unifies accounting, audit, tax, compliance, financial reporting, practice management, regulatory intelligence, and client collaboration into a single secure workspace built for the realities of Nigerian professional practice.

Core Workflow

The fundamental professional workflow in CharteredPro follows this path:

Client → Engagement → Information Request → Documents → Data → Processing → Review → Reconciliation → Compliance → Reporting → Approval → Delivery → Archive

The platform eliminates the fragmented workflow of Excel + WhatsApp + email + paper files that characterises most Nigerian accounting practices today.

2. Getting Started

2.1 Creating Your Account

1. Visit the CharteredPro landing page and click "Start free trial".
2. Enter your full name, professional email address, and a strong password (minimum 12 characters, with uppercase, lowercase, number, and symbol).
3. Check your email for a confirmation link and click it to verify your address.
4. You will be redirected to the onboarding wizard.

2.2 Onboarding

The onboarding wizard guides you through five steps:

1. Create your organisation — enter your firm name, type (sole practitioner, accounting firm, audit firm, etc.), and contact details.
2. Choose a plan — select Solo, Professional, Practice, or Enterprise. All plans include a 14-day free trial.
3. Invite team members — add partners, managers, and staff by email with their assigned roles.
4. Add your first client — enter the client's legal name, entity type, tax identifiers, and applicable services.
5. View your dashboard — you're ready to start managing your practice professionally.

3. Roles & Permissions

CharteredPro uses role-based access control. Your role determines what you can see and do within your organisation.

4. Professional Dashboard

The dashboard is your command centre. When you open CharteredPro each morning, it answers one question: "What requires my attention right now?"

Dashboard Widgets

• Today's Priorities — overdue tasks, approaching deadlines, pending approvals, missing documents, unreconciled accounts
• Engagement Overview — active, completed, overdue, and upcoming engagements
• Compliance Overview — overdue, due soon, completed, and upcoming obligations
• Client Health — missing information, overdue documents, outstanding fees, compliance risk
• Financial Overview — revenue, expenses, receivables, cash position (for authorised roles)

The dashboard adapts to your role. A firm partner sees practice-wide metrics; a staff accountant sees their assigned work; an auditor sees active audit engagements and review notes.

5. Dark / Light Mode

CharteredPro supports three theme modes:

• System (default) — follows your operating system's dark/light preference
• Light — always light theme
• Dark — always dark theme

Toggle the theme using the theme button in the navigation bar. Your preference is saved and syncs across browser tabs. Generated PDFs always use a print-optimised light layout regardless of your screen theme.

6. Offline Behaviour

CharteredPro is a Progressive Web App (PWA) that can be installed on your phone or laptop. When your connection drops:

• A clear "You are offline" banner appears
• Recently viewed pages may remain accessible in read-only mode
• Draft notes and task updates may be saved locally with a "sync pending" indicator
• Sensitive operations are blocked — journal posting, tax filing, report approval, and document uploads require a live connection
• The app never pretends a transaction succeeded when the server has not confirmed it

7. Client Management

Every client gets a centralised professional profile containing:

• Identity — legal name, trading name, entity type, registration number, tax identifiers
• Contacts — directors, finance contacts, authorised representatives, portal users
• Services — bookkeeping, accounting, tax, audit, payroll, advisory
• Compliance Profile — applicable tax and regulatory obligations
• Engagement History — all current and historical engagements
• Documents — central document repository
• Billing — invoices, fees, outstanding balances
• Activity Timeline — complete chronological history of all interactions

The system includes duplicate detection to prevent creating the same client twice.

8. Engagement Management

An engagement is the core professional unit of work. Supported types include bookkeeping, accounting, tax, audit, review, advisory, payroll, financial reporting, and internal audit.

Each engagement tracks: scope, dates, assigned team (partner, manager, staff), tasks, deadlines, documents, review states, deliverables, and billing.

Review States

Engagements and their deliverables follow explicit review states:

Draft → Prepared → Submitted for Review → Under Review → Review Comments → Returned → Approved → Finalised → Locked

9. Tasks & Deadlines

Every professional workflow supports tasks with: title, description, client, engagement, priority, owner, reviewer, due date, status, dependencies, attachments, and comments.

Task statuses: Not Started → In Progress → Blocked → Submitted → Under Review → Completed

Deadlines are auto-generated from compliance obligations and tax rules. The system calculates due dates based on filing frequency, accounting period, and Nigerian public holidays, with configurable reminders at 30, 14, 7, 3, and 1 days before the due date.

10. Document Management

Documents are a central feature of CharteredPro. The system supports folders, categories, tags, client and engagement association, versioning, metadata, search, and secure sharing.

Supported file types: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, JPG, PNG, and common office documents. Maximum file size: 50 MB per file.

All documents are stored in private, encrypted storage with signed URLs that expire after 15 minutes. No permanent public links are generated for confidential client documents.

10.1 Document Requests

The document request system replaces informal WhatsApp chasing. Create a structured request listing required documents (e.g., bank statements, payroll, sales schedule), set a due date, and assign it to a client contact. The client receives a notification and uploads documents through the secure portal. The dashboard shows progress: "12 requested, 8 received, 4 outstanding."

11. Accounting Workspace

CharteredPro includes a real double-entry accounting engine — not a superficial transaction list.

11.1 Chart of Accounts

Configure a chart of accounts for each client with account codes, names, types (asset, liability, equity, income, expense), subtypes, and normal balance direction. Import from CSV or use the default Nigerian chart template.

11.2 Journal Entries

Record journal entries with debit and credit lines. The system enforces double-entry integrity: total debits must equal total credits before a journal can be posted. Unbalanced journals are rejected by the database.

Posted journals are immutable. Corrections are made through reversal journals or adjusting entries, preserving the complete audit trail.

11.3 General Ledger & Trial Balance

View the general ledger by account with drill-down to underlying journal entries. Generate a trial balance for any period — total debits will always equal total credits if the books are in balance.

11.4 Bank Reconciliation

Import bank statements (CSV), and the system will suggest automatic matches against your journal entries. Accept, reject, or manually match transactions. The reconciliation workspace clearly shows book balance, bank balance, outstanding items, and the difference. Completed reconciliations are locked and require reviewer sign-off to reopen.

12. Financial Reports

Generate professional financial reports directly from your ledger data:

• Statement of Financial Position
• Statement of Profit or Loss
• Cash Flow Statement
• Statement of Changes in Equity
• Trial Balance
• General Ledger
• Receivables and Payables Ageing
• Expense and Revenue Analysis
• Management Accounts

All reports support date ranges, comparative periods, and export to PDF, CSV, and Excel-compatible formats. PDF exports include your firm's branding, client name, reporting period, preparer/reviewer names, and professional disclaimers.

Every figure in a report is linked to the underlying data. Click any number to drill down from the financial statement → account → ledger → journal → source document.

13. Tax & Compliance Centre

The Tax & Compliance Centre manages all Nigerian tax obligations: VAT, WHT, PAYE, CIT, PIT, Education Tax, Tertiary Education Tax, state levies, pension contributions, and other statutory obligations.

13.1 Compliance Calendar

Each client has an automatically generated compliance calendar based on their entity type, jurisdiction, applicable obligations, and accounting period. Deadlines are categorised as upcoming, due soon, overdue, filed, verified, exempt, or not applicable.

13.2 Tax Computations

Prepare tax computations using the structured computation workspace. Every computation records which version of the tax rule was used, ensuring historical filings remain reproducible even when rules change. Computations follow the review workflow: draft → reviewed → approved → filed.

14. Audit Workspace

The audit workspace supports the full audit engagement lifecycle aligned with ISA as adopted in Nigeria:

• Planning — engagement acceptance, independence checks, conflict checks, risk assessment, materiality, audit strategy, audit programme
• Working Papers — structured papers with reference numbers, objectives, procedures, evidence, conclusions, preparer, reviewer, and review notes
• Evidence — attach invoices, bank statements, confirmations, contracts, and supporting calculations directly to audit procedures
• Findings — record condition, criteria, cause, effect, recommendation, management response, responsible person, and due date
• Review — managers and partners review work, leave notes, clear points, return for correction, and approve

Review history is never silently deleted. Every note, clearance, and approval is preserved in the audit trail.

15. Regulatory Intelligence

The regulatory intelligence centre provides versioned Nigerian regulatory content: tax laws, FIRS circulars, FRC pronouncements, ICAN guidance, accounting standards, audit standards, and professional ethics.

Every regulatory item displays its source, authority, effective date, jurisdiction, version status, and last verified date. The system never presents uncertain interpretations as absolute facts.

When a regulatory rule changes, the platform identifies what changed, when it takes effect, which clients are affected, and what workflows need review. Regulatory alerts appear on your dashboard until acknowledged.

16. Knowledge Centre

The searchable knowledge centre covers accounting, audit, tax, financial reporting, professional ethics, practice management, Nigerian regulation, templates, worked examples, and learning materials.

Search supports natural language queries such as:

• "How should I approach a bank reconciliation?"
• "What documents should I request for an audit?"
• "What tax obligations apply to this client?"

17. Client Portal

The client portal gives your clients a secure, restricted workspace where they can:

• View and respond to document requests
• Upload documents securely
• See upcoming deadlines
• View approved reports and invoices
• Send and receive messages from the engagement team

Clients cannot see internal professional information, draft reports, review comments, working papers, or other clients' data. Portal access is strictly isolated by Row Level Security at the database level.

18. Notifications

CharteredPro sends in-app notifications for deadlines, document requests, task assignments, review requests, approvals, payments, regulatory updates, and security alerts. Configure your notification preferences in your profile settings to control which types you receive.

19. Super Admin Console

The Super Admin console is a separate, secure administration environment for platform management. It is accessible only to users with the Super Admin role.

Capabilities

• Organisations — create, suspend, activate, view metadata, manage subscriptions
• Users — view, suspend, manage security status
• Regulatory Content — create, update, version, publish, retire tax rules and regulatory sources
• Knowledge Articles — author and publish knowledge centre content
• System Settings — feature flags, notification rules, platform configuration

19.1 Analytics & Hit Counter

The analytics dashboard displays visitor traffic (total visits, unique sessions, page popularity, device/browser/country breakdowns, growth trends) and platform metrics (active organisations, users, feature adoption, storage utilisation). All analytics data is anonymised — no IP addresses or PII are stored.

Click "Download PDF Report" to generate a professionally formatted PDF with CharteredPro branding, charts, data tables, and page numbers.

19.2 Landing Page Image Management

The Super Admin can manage all images on the landing page from the admin dashboard — no code changes required. Upload, replace, or hide images for the hero section, feature cards, testimonials, Nigeria-first section, and CTA background. Each slot requires alt text for accessibility.

20. Security & Data Protection

Security is a first-class feature of CharteredPro. The platform implements:

• Multi-tenant isolation — Row Level Security at the PostgreSQL database level ensures one firm can never access another firm's data
• Authentication — JWT-based auth with strong password policy (12+ characters), optional MFA, and rate limiting
• Private storage — all documents stored in private buckets with signed URLs (15-minute expiry)
• Financial data integrity — NUMERIC(20,4) for all monetary values (never floating-point), double-entry balance enforcement, posted journal immutability
• Complete audit trail — every material action logged with user, timestamp, action, entity, and value changes
• HTTPS everywhere — enforced by Cloudflare with HSTS
• Content Security Policy — prevents XSS and inline script injection

20.1 Audit Trail

Every material action is recorded: journal creation, posting, reversal; report generation and approval; document upload and deletion; permission changes; tax rule updates; engagement approvals. Audit logs are append-only and cannot be modified or deleted by ordinary users.

Data Protection

CharteredPro is designed with the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) 2023 in mind. The platform supports data minimisation, consent mechanisms, controlled access, deletion policies, and data subject rights. Financial records are treated as high-value data with extended retention periods (minimum 7 years for audit and tax records).

21. Support & Contact

For platform support, feature requests, or security concerns:

• Email: oglegbae@gmail.com
• Security issues: email with subject line [SECURITY] followed by a brief description
• Documentation: this manual, plus technical docs at /docs/

CharteredPro — The Professional Operating System for Nigerian Accountancy.
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