Introduction
“What actually happens when I press Finalise?” More than the screen shows, and nothing at all until you press it. This page is the fifteen minutes before you start clicking, for anyone who has just been given a login. It covers what the product is, what your day in it will look like, the two facts behind most of the things that surprise new users, and what to do when your first hour does not go the way this page says.
What BigLedger is
BigLedger (akaun.com) is a web-based, cloud-native business operating system: accounting, inventory, sales, purchasing, point of sale, e-commerce, HR and Malaysian LHDN e-Invoice, in one browser tab, over one shared set of records.
You will not be installing anything, and you will not be exporting data from one part of it into another. Your customer list is one customer list. The sales screen, the statement of account and the till all read the same record. What a document does keep is a copy of the customer’s name, address and terms as they were when it was made, so correcting a customer today changes the next invoice and leaves last month’s as it was issued.
What you will actually be doing
Whatever your role, your work in BigLedger is mostly one of four shapes:
- Raising documents — a sales order, a purchase order, an invoice, a receipt. Almost everything you do is a document, and every document follows the same lifecycle.
- Maintaining master data — customers, suppliers, items, prices. Set up once, used by everything.
- Reading reports — what is owed, what is in stock, what sold.
- Configuring — usually somebody else’s job, but worth recognising when you are in a settings screen. Who holds the Owner and Admin ranks, and who decides the default GL codes, are settled by whoever sets the tenant up (Getting Started names them).
One part of the first shape is a person’s job from day one: clearing your own drafts. A draft stays a draft until somebody finalises or discards it. At the end of each day, filter your document listing on DRAFT status and deal with every row: finalise what is right, discard what was a false start. You are done when the listing shows no draft older than today that you cannot explain.
The two facts that explain most surprises
1. Draft means nothing has happened yet.
Every document goes DRAFT → FINAL, and can then be VOIDed. While it is a draft you can edit it freely — and so can a colleague whose permission covers its company, branch or location, because a draft is not private: it sits in the listing like any other document, and the Sales Order listing can finalise drafts in bulk. What a draft does not do is anything downstream. It posts nothing, moves no stock and starts no follow-on job, because the jobs that write the journal, the stock lines and everything after them are queued only when the document goes FINAL. A draft sales order opens no lines for a packing order to pick up, and Send To Queue refuses it, so the warehouse’s Pick Pack Queue never sees it. A draft invoice has no journal and is in no aging report.
When somebody says “I raised it and nothing happened”, the answer is nearly always that it is still a draft.
The reverse also catches people. Pressing Finalise hands the journal, the stock movement and the e-invoice to background jobs, and your screen comes back before they have run. A document can therefore be FINAL and still have no journal, because the job that writes it stopped. That is a setup failure, not a draft, and it is on Getting Started’s own table.
2. Not every document posts.
This is the one that catches accountants and warehouse managers alike. On the sales side, stock leaves and the sale posts when a sales invoice or a POS cash bill is finalised — or a Sales GIN Stock Out, a goods issue created only through the API. The quotation, the sales order, the delivery note and the delivery order record intent and drive the process — they change nothing in your accounts and nothing in your stock balance.
(An open sales order does reduce the available quantity, so the same unit is not promised twice. It just does not leave stock.)
Purchasing is the mirror image: a standard goods received note records the count and closes the purchase order down; the purchase invoice is what books the stock in and creates the liability. A company that needs stock on the shelf before the bill arrives uses a different pair of documents, chosen once per company (Standard procurement workflow says which, and what mixing them does).
Understanding this before you start saves an extraordinary amount of confusion later. The full picture is in best practices.
Where the documentation is, and how it is arranged
Four layers, and knowing which one you want saves time:
- Guides — where you are now. Task-shaped: how to do the thing, and end-to-end business processes such as a credit sale from quotation to collection, a month-end close or an e-Invoice submission.
- Concepts — the why underneath most answers. It follows one sales invoice from Save through Finalise to the journal, and says where each figure on it came from.
- Modules — what each business area does behind the screen, and which applets it uses.
- Applet reference — screen-by-screen, field-by-field detail for each of the nearly 150 applets documented here. When you need to know exactly what a setting does, this is the layer that knows.
Modules link to applet pages rather than repeating them, so there is one page per applet and it is always the current one. The reference describes every applet, and your launchpad shows only the ones installed for your login, so a page about an applet you cannot see is not a mistake (see the first row below).
When your first hour goes wrong
These are the things new users report in their first hour, in the words they use. Two other tables carry the rest: Getting Started has the setup failures, which whoever set the tenant up fixes, and the Beginner’s guide has the questions of a first week’s ordinary work.
| Symptom | Cause | Fix, and where to read |
|---|---|---|
| “An applet I read about is not on my launchpad.” | Applets are installed for one login at a time, from the catalogues an administrator has opened to you. A colleague’s launchpad says nothing about yours | Install it from the Applet Store. If it is not in any catalogue you can see, ask the tenant’s Owner or Admin to link you to one that has it |
| “The company dropdown is empty when I create a document.” | Your permission names a branch but no company. The Company selector offers only the companies your permission names, so it opens empty and the document will not save | Ask the Owner or Admin to give your role a company target as well as the branch (Teams and permissions) |
| “A document has disappeared from a listing.” | Listings open filtered, usually on status and a date range | Open Advanced Search and widen the range first. If it is still missing, it is the permission row on Getting Started’s table |
| “A document shows as TEMP with no document number.” | A screen that imports lines or converts a file creates an empty placeholder first, and numbers it only when it is first really saved | Open it and save it; the number is assigned then (Document numbering) |
| “Stock Availability shows 50 physical but 0 available.” | Fact 2’s parenthesis: sales orders not yet invoiced hold the stock back, and so does a stock reservation. A balance left on an order that was voided, or on a line removed from one, still counts | Open Stock Availability’s Details screen and untick HIDE_SALES_ORDER_BALANCE in the Optional filter to see which orders (Stock Availability) |
“I saved it and nothing happened” is fact 1, and a draft. Every other first-week symptom is on one of the two tables above.
Your first hour
- Find your way around — the launchpad, the search box, and building a view of the applets you actually use.
- Platform overview — applets, modules, companies and branches.
- Basic operations — the first things you will do for real.
- Daily tasks — the routine.
What this page connects to
| Relationship | What it is | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Upstream | Before you can use this page you need a login linked to the tenant, applets installed on it, and a company to work in. The tenant’s Owner or Admin provides the first two; the company is the job of whoever sets the tenant up | Getting Started |
| Downstream | Once the two facts make sense, each module hub lets you see what its documents do behind the screen: which post, which move stock, and what they hand to the next one | Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Financial Accounting, POS, E-Invoice |
| Sibling | Read the Beginner’s guide rather than this page while you are still deciding, or have no login yet. This page is for the reader who has one and is about to start. The Concepts section is for when a number puzzles you | Beginner’s guide, Concepts |
| Blast radius | Fact 1 misread affects sales, inventory and the books at once, and reaches people who never touch your screen. Sales invoices left as drafts, at any branch, are in no aging report and have no journal, so the company’s aging and its general ledger both leave them out, and nothing reports an error. A draft sales order never reaches the warehouse’s Pick Pack Queue | Financial Accounting, Inventory |
| Pairing | In practice this page is read alongside Finding your way around, which shows the screen it describes, and with the Concepts section, which follows one invoice through Finalise. When neither answers you, Support says who to ask | Support |
What success looks like
You are ready to start when you can answer these three:
- What is the difference between a draft and a final document? (Anyone whose permission covers it can open and edit a draft; what a draft does not do is post, move stock or start a job — nothing downstream happens until it is FINAL.)
- Which sales document moves stock? (The sales invoice — and the POS cash bill at the counter.)
- Where do you look up exactly what a setting does? (The applet reference page for that applet.)
Then run one check on your own tenant, if Stock Availability is on your launchpad. Find an item that has one open sales order at a location, and no reservation or uninvoiced goods receipt there. You have passed when its row shows Stock Balance unchanged by the order and Available Qty lower than it by exactly the order’s uninvoiced quantity. That is fact 2 on your own data: the order has promised the stock without moving it.
Where to ask
If the documentation does not answer your question, open an issue at BigLedger-Support/public. Say which applet you were in, what you expected to happen and what happened instead — those three lines turn a day of back-and-forth into one reply. Anyone can read the tracker, so keep your tenant code and your own records out of the post; a question about your own tenant goes to your BigLedger contact (see Support).