Chart of Accounts & General Ledger

1. THE CHART OF ACCOUNTS

Accounting → Chart of Accounts gives you your business's full list of GL accounts, each with a type (Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue, or Expense) and a live running balance. New accounts start from a sensible default chart, and you can add your own as your business grows into needing them — the system helps categorize each new one into the right type automatically.

2. WHY YOU CAN TRUST THE NUMBERS (what happens behind every posting)

Every module in the product — Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Production, Payroll, Cash & Banks — funnels through one single, shared posting engine to actually write to the ledger. No screen gets to touch the ledger directly. That single choke point is what guarantees, for every transaction anywhere in the product:

graph LR
  A["Business Event"] --> B["Shared Posting Engine"]
  B --> C{"Period Locked?"}
  C -->|"Yes"| R["Rejected"]
  C -->|"No"| D{"Debits = Credits?"}
  D -->|"No"| R
  D -->|"Yes"| E{"Already Posted?"}
  E -->|"Yes"| R
  E -->|"No"| F["Posted to General Ledger"]
  F --> G["Financial Statements"]

• It always balances. An entry where debits don't exactly equal credits is rejected outright — it's mathematically impossible for an unbalanced entry to reach your books.
• No double-posting. If the same business event (say, one specific invoice) is somehow submitted twice, the second attempt is recognized and rejected — your revenue can't accidentally get counted twice.
• Closed periods stay closed. If your books are locked through a certain date (see the Period Close & Lock guide), any attempt to post an entry on or before that date is rejected immediately — before anything else is even checked — so a closed period can never be silently reopened by accident.
• Nothing is ever silently deleted or overwritten. Correcting a mistake — whether it's an automatic entry or a manual one you edit — doesn't erase the original. It posts a mirror-image reversal as a brand-new, dated entry, and marks the original as reversed. Both stay permanently visible. Your history is always complete, which is exactly what an audit requires.

3. POSTING A MANUAL JOURNAL ENTRY — STEP BY STEP

1. Accounting → Journals → New Entry.
2. Enter a date, time, and memo describing what this entry is for.
3. Add rows, each naming a debit account and amount, or a credit account and amount, with an optional per-row description.
4. Optionally attach supporting documents (receipts, PDFs) directly to the entry.
5. Save. If your debits and credits don't match exactly to the cent, or the entry falls in a locked period, you get a clear error and nothing is posted — never a silent partial save.
6. Editing a saved entry later doesn't quietly change history — it reverses the original and posts a fresh one, so the full story (what it originally said, that it was corrected, and what it says now) stays visible forever.

4. AUTOMATIC POSTING — YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS YOURSELF

For day-to-day operations, you'll rarely touch a journal entry form at all — the correct accounting treatment for every type of business event (a sale, a bill payment, a stock adjustment, a production receipt, a depreciation run, a POS sale) is built in and fires automatically the moment that event happens. A $500 sale invoice automatically debits Accounts Receivable and credits Sales Revenue $500, with zero manual bookkeeping involved — and the same rigor and validation described above applies whether the entry came from a form you filled out or from the system posting on your behalf.

5. CASH & BANK RECONCILIATION

Deposit, withdraw, and reconcile actions against your Cash & Bank accounts (see the Cash & Bank Management guide) post through this same engine — reconciliation compares your book balance against your bank statement and posts whatever adjusting entries are needed to bring them back in line, keeping your recorded cash position honest.

6. HOW IT CONNECTS TO THE REST OF THE SYSTEM

• Every transactional module — Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Production, Payroll — posts through this exact same engine, so every feature guide in this library that mentions "posts to the general ledger" is describing this system specifically.
• Period Close & Lock — the lock check described there runs as the very first step inside this engine's posting logic.
• Financial Statements & Budgeting — both read directly from the ledger this engine produces, live.

7. WHY IT SCALES FROM SMB TO ENTERPRISE

Quick Reference

  Chart of Accounts ........................ Accounting > Chart of Accounts
  Journals (manual entries) ................ Accounting > Journals
  Cash & Bank actions ...................... Accounting > Cash & Banks