Introduction

Welcome to BigLedger. This page is the fifteen minutes before you start clicking: what the product is, what your day in it will look like, and the two facts that explain most of the things that surprise new users.

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 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.

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 — critically — nobody else can see it, act on it, or be affected by it. A draft sales order is invisible to the warehouse. A draft invoice is invisible to accounts.

When somebody says “I raised it and nothing happened”, the answer is nearly always that it is still a draft.

2. Not every document posts.

This is the one that catches accountants and warehouse managers alike. On the sales side, only the sales invoice and the POS cash bill move stock and post to your ledger. 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.

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

Three layers, and knowing which one you want saves time:

User guide — where you are now. Task-shaped: how to do the thing.
Workflow guides — end-to-end business processes: a credit sale from quotation to collection, a month-end close, an e-Invoice submission.
Applet reference — screen-by-screen, field-by-field detail for each of the 200-odd applets. 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.

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 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? (A draft is invisible to everybody else and has no effect.)
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.)

Where to ask

If the documentation does not answer your question, open an issue at BigLedger-Support/public. Say which tenant you are on, which applet you were in, and what you expected to happen — those three lines turn a day of back-and-forth into one reply.