The quick guide

• What you needWindows 10 or Windows 11, 64 bit. About 400 MB of disk space for the program, plus room for your data.
• No internet needed for the accountingA connection is only wanted for the parts that talk to somebody else: Companies House lookups, filing with HMRC, and email. The bookkeeping itself runs with the network down. For the register lookups you need your own free Companies House API key, which takes a couple of minutes to register for, and the screen that wants it tells you where to get it and where to put it. Adding a client works without one; it just will not fill the company in for you.
• There is no account to createMurgese is not a website. Nothing is signed up for, and your books stay on your machine.

1. Run the installer you were sent.
2. Windows may still warn you the first time. Choose More info, then Run anyway. The installer is signed by Murgese Ltd, so the publisher is named rather than unknown, but a new certificate has no reputation with Windows SmartScreen until enough copies have been run and that is earned over time rather than bought. Check the publisher says Murgese Ltd, and carry on.
3. Choose where to install it. The default installs for your Windows account only and needs no administrator rights.
4. When it finishes, Murgese is in your Start menu.

The first person to open Murgese sets the installation up: your name, your email address and a password. That account becomes the administrator.

On first sign-in Murgese asks which edition to run as. It needs this once, and it decides which screens appear and nothing else.

• A business keeping its own booksOne company doing its own bookkeeping and year end. No client list to manage.
• An accountancy practiceMany client companies, with the job board, deadlines and time recording as well. Every accounting screen then sits inside a client.

You can change it later, and changing it does not touch a single record. Your existing books are not affected either way.

You are then asked to accept the terms and the privacy notice. Both are readable in full inside the product afterwards, along with the date and version you accepted. A short tour offers itself next; skipping it holds nothing back and you can start it again later.

Murgese has one window, split in two. The sidebar on the left is where you choose what to work on. Everything else is the screen you chose.

• The sidebar follows where you areOn a practice screen it lists the practice screens. Open a client and it becomes that client’s sidebar, with the accounting screens grouped by the kind of work, the company named at the top with its VAT and CIS badges beside it, and a Return to practice link that is always in the same place. The alternative, one sidebar carrying both, grows to fifty items and stops being a way of finding anything. A line above the screen says where you are: the firm, then the company, then the screen.
• One group open at a timeSales, Purchases, Accounting, Tax and year end and the rest are folded until you want them, and the one holding the screen you are standing on is the one that is open. Open or shut a group yourself and it stays that way, for you, on that machine. Two people signing in to the same practice server each get their own, rather than each other’s.
• Find a screen, or a recordThe box at the top of the sidebar takes two or three letters and finds screens, and, once you are in a company, the invoices, bills, contacts and journals inside it. In the practice edition it also finds companies and the people on them, so a client can be opened by typing their name from wherever you are. Press / from anywhere to jump into it without reaching for the mouse.
• Favourites, and where you have just beenStar the five or six screens your week is actually spent on and they sit at the top of the sidebar. Underneath them, the last few places you have been, so getting back is one click rather than a hunt through a group you have to remember the name of.
• Search from anywhere with Ctrl+KThe command palette finds screens and every report by name, so a report added last month can be typed rather than hunted for in the library. It searches what exists, not a list somebody remembered to update.
• Nothing is hidden because you have not used it yetA screen disappears only where the company cannot have it in law: a sole trader has no corporation tax return, a company outside the construction scheme has no CIS return. A screen is never hidden for being unused. “No VAT return has been filed here” is not “this company is not registered for VAT”, and a statutory screen that vanishes quietly is one nobody is reminded of in the month it first becomes due.
• Two screens open at onceHold the bank on one tab and a report or the ledger on the other, and move between them without losing the filter, the sort, the scroll position or your place in a list of three hundred lines. A tab draws its figures again when you come back to it rather than showing you the ones it had. Close a tab with something typed into it and you are asked first, because closing it would throw the typing away.
• One action on a row, the rest behind MoreThe thing you came to the row for stays where you can click it. Everything else, and anything that destroys something, is behind a labelled More menu, so a delete takes two deliberate movements rather than one stray click, and then explains in words what it will do to the books.
• Column widths you set onceDrag a column heading and the width is remembered for that screen, on every table in the application. A table nobody has dragged is left exactly as it was. The pages of a set of statutory accounts are not draggable, because that layout is what goes to Companies House.
• Help on this screenThe last item in the sidebar. It opens the help written for the screen you are standing on, rather than a search box you have to know the right word for.
• The File menuMurgese is a Windows application, so it has a File menu, and what is on it is nowhere else: back up now, restore from backup, open the data folder, and the backup schedule.

Small coloured labels appear throughout, and they always mean the same thing.

Murgese keeps everything in one database file in your Windows user profile, and the product shows you exactly where. Because it is one file, backing Murgese up is backing that file up, and the product does it for you on a schedule you set.