Core accounting
Real double-entry. A general ledger where every figure traces back to the transaction that made it.
The chart of accounts
Accounts are held as a tree. So you can group and roll up without inventing numbering tricks to fake a hierarchy.
"Vehicle Expense" can have Fuel, Repairs and Insurance under it. It reports as one line, and it opens when you want the detail.
Why the software refuses some accounts
Every account type carries its normal balance side. That is whether a debit raises it or lowers it.
That one fact drives the sign of every figure in every report the account appears in.
So the software will not let you create an account type it cannot classify. If it does not know which way an account behaves, every statement with it in is wrong — and wrong quietly. The numbers still foot. They are just on the wrong side.
Refusing at creation is cheaper than finding it in a trial balance eighteen months later.
Starting the chart
You choose how to start. Begin from a suggested chart for your industry, or build your own. Nothing is created behind your back.
Some accounts a posting routine truly needs — the one a discount or a rounding difference has to land in. Those are created when they are first needed, not demanded up front. Once they hold history they are protected from deletion.
The general ledger
This part is worth understanding, because most of the rest depends on it.
Every balance is derived from the transactions that made it. There is no stored running total that reporting reads instead.
That sounds like a technical detail. It is the difference between reports that agree and reports that drift.
Here is the common failure, and it happens in software far more expensive than this. One report reads a stored balance. Another totals transactions. Both foot internally. Neither looks wrong. And they disagree with each other, usually by an amount nobody can explain.
Here, everything feeds one ledger — invoices, bills, checks, deposits, journal entries, all of it. The statements read from that.
So your balance sheet and your profit and loss cannot be on different bases. There is only one basis.
What this buys you day to day
- Any figure on a report opens to the transactions behind it, all the way down.
- Fix a transaction and it shows everywhere at once. There is no rebuild step.
- A closed period is computed the same way as an open one.
Journal entries
For things that do not arrive as an invoice or a check. Accruals. Reclassifications. Depreciation. Opening balances. Your accountant's year-end adjustments.
Entries can be saved as drafts and reviewed before they post. So an adjustment somebody is unsure about does not sit in the ledger while you argue about it.
Financial statements
- Balance sheet
- Profit and loss
- Income statement
- Trial balance
- Cash flow statement
- General ledger detail
All of them for any period. All comparable against any other period.
Period control
Closing a period stops it taking postings. Two details make that actually work rather than nearly work.
It checks the stored date, not just the one you submitted. The obvious hole in a period lock is re-dating. Open a transaction in an open period, change its date to one inside a closed period, save.
A guard that only looks at the date you submitted lets that through. This one compares against the date already on the transaction. So a transaction cannot be walked backwards out of a locked period.
It gates voids. Voiding a posted transaction reverses its entries. If the original sat in a closed period, that reversal lands there too.
Voids that would do that are refused. They do not quietly reopen a month you told your accountant was finished.
Year end
Closing a year locks it and produces the year-end reporting.
Retained earnings are derived. They are not rolled forward into a stored balance.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. With a roll-forward, a closed year and an open year are computed differently. Re-open a closed year to post one adjustment and you double-count the earnings already rolled.
Deriving means there is one calculation. A re-opened year behaves correctly. And closing is a reporting and locking job, not a change to your data you cannot undo.