Money out
Vendors, bills, and the check run.
Vendors
Records with addresses, contacts, terms and 1099 classification. Vendors can be grouped.
A vendor can also carry a default expense account. So the bills you enter forty times a year code themselves. Only the odd ones need thought.
Bills and expenses
Enter a bill against a vendor with line-item coding. Or use quick expense entry for the things that never arrive as a proper invoice.
Every line carries its account and its enterprise. So one bill covering two parts of the business is split where you enter it, not reclassified later.
Attachments. A scan, or a photo from your phone, files against the transaction itself.
Open the bill and the receipt is on it. Nothing to go hunting for during an audit. Nothing that depends on somebody having filed it under the right name three years ago.
Images are downscaled and re-encoded on the way in. That includes the HEIC files an iPhone makes, which are turned into JPEGs so they open anywhere. A year of receipts stays a sensible size on disk, and copies quickly across a shared drive. PDFs are stored as they are, not re-compressed.
Credit memos apply against open bills.
Paying
Pick the open bills you want to pay. Apply the discounts that are really available. Produce a payment run.
Bills can be paid by check, ACH, wire, card or cash. The payment settles the bill and the vendor balance either way. So what left the bank on a card or a direct debit sits in the ledger beside what went through the printer.
Check printing
This gets more attention than it seems to deserve. A check that prints half a line off is a check your bank may reject, and a job somebody has to redo.
Stock formats
Checks print on standard pre-printed stock in all three common layouts. Check on top with two stubs below. Check in the middle. Check on the bottom.
Both stock families work, and this is where most software gets it wrong.
Voucher stock has a 3½-inch check, with the stubs making up the rest. Equal-perforated stock is cut in even thirds, so the check is 3⅔ inches.
Those are different geometries. A layout built for one prints about 4mm out of position on the other. Four millimeters is enough to put the signature line through a perforation.
Printer calibration
Here is the part nobody tells you. The offset cannot be looked up.
It is not a property of the check stock. It is not a property of the printer model either. It varies unit to unit. Buy the same printer twice and the two place the page slightly differently.
So Moab Ledger calibrates instead of guessing. It prints one alignment page. You measure two marks on it with a ruler and type in what you measured. It solves for your printer's scale and offset.
After that your checks land where they should, on that printer, for good.
It takes about two minutes, once. It is the difference between check printing working and check printing being a thing you gave up on.
1099
Vendor payments are tracked against their 1099 boxes through the year, as they happen.
That is the whole point. January's filing becomes a report you run. It is not a reconstruction from twelve months of check stubs.
Recipient copies and the filing file come from the same figures. So what you send the vendor and what you send the IRS cannot disagree.