Getting started

Download, open your first company, and post a voucher — in about five minutes.

1. Download & first launch

Grab the build for your machine from the homepage — macOS (Apple Silicon) or Windows. Total isn’t code-signed yet, so on macOS Gatekeeper will say the app “is damaged and can’t be opened”. Right-click → Open does not get past this for the current build — instead:

# 1. Move Total.app into /Applications
mv ~/Downloads/Total.app /Applications/

# 2. Clear the quarantine flag Gatekeeper set on download
xattr -cr /Applications/Total.app

# 3. Now it opens normally — double-click, or:
open /Applications/Total.app

You only need to do this once per downloaded version — later launches (and auto-updates) open normally.

2. Create your company

The first screen you’ll see is company creation. It asks for:

• Company name
• State — used for GST place-of-supply and CGST/SGST vs IGST decisions
• Books begin (FY) — the financial year your opening balances start from, e.g. “1 Apr 2025”
• GSTIN — optional; leave it empty if you’re not GST-registered
• Registration type — Regular or Composition, shown once a GSTIN is entered (Total’s GST return builders target regular registration — see GST returns)
• Address

Each company gets its own SQLite file, so you can run as many separate businesses side by side as you like without their books ever touching.

3. The Gateway, in one screen

Every session opens on the Gateway — a set of tiles showing your whole position, each reachable by a single-letter key from anywhere (as long as focus isn’t in a text field):

⌘K opens global search — jump to any ledger, voucher, or command by typing its name, from anywhere in the app.

4. Post your first sales invoice

Press F8 from the Gateway (or V then pick Sales) to open a Sales voucher. Fill the party, add stock items or ledger lines, and GST computes live as you type quantities and rates. Save with ⌘↵; back out of any screen with Esc. The same one-key pattern covers the rest of voucher entry:

Inside any list — the ledger picker, item search, voucher list — ↑ ↓ move and ↵ drills in, exactly like the amber cursor bar on the homepage.

5. Where your files live

Everything lives under ~/Documents/total/ — nothing touches the cloud:

• companies/<slug>/company.db — one SQLite file per company, the single source of truth
• companies/<slug>/backups/ — automatic, WAL-safe snapshots taken every 30 minutes, on open, and on quit (the last 20 auto-snapshots are kept)
• companies/<slug>/exports/ — PDFs, CSVs, and JSON you export (invoices, GST returns, CA packs, and so on)

Copy the whole total folder anywhere and you’ve backed up every company on the machine. More on snapshots and restoring in Backups & data.