Troubleshooting

Something is not working and you want it working. This page is the list of things that actually go wrong in BigLedger, in the order they come up, with the real messages and the real fix. Among them: documents that will not finalise, documents that finalise with no journal behind them, serial, batch or bin quantities that do not match the line, numbers that look wrong, and two reports that disagree.

Two diagnostic screens are named at the bottom that most people never find. If you are stuck on a posting problem, skip straight to them.

Start here: which kind of problem is it?

• “It will not save or finalise” — there is a message. Read it; it names the thing. Jump to Documents that will not finalise.
• “It saved but nothing happened” — almost always a draft, a document type that does not post, or a posting that failed after FINAL. Jump to Nothing happened.
• “I cannot find it” — almost always a default filter. Jump to Things you cannot find.
• “The number is wrong” — jump to Numbers that look wrong, and then to When two numbers don’t tally, which takes the figure that disagrees one symptom at a time.
• “The button is not there” — jump to Missing buttons, menus and applets.
• “I cannot change it” — a finalised document, and the lock is narrower than it looks. Jump to I cannot edit a finalised invoice.
• “Nothing has happened to my e-invoice” — almost always queued rather than stuck. Understanding e-invoice statuses has the wait-or-act table and the overnight rule.

Documents that will not finalise

“Customer is blacklisted due to credit limit…”

What you see: “Customer is blacklisted due to credit limit. Transactions are not allowed for this customer.” — or the credit-term wording, or both together.

What is happening: a scheduled job compares each customer’s outstanding balance against their credit limit and their overdue terms, and flags the ones that fail. The block reads that flag. It is not recalculated as you type, so it reflects the position at the last run of the job.

It applies to four document types and no others: cash bill, sales invoice, sales order and outbound delivery order.

Fix: clear the flag on the customer record — and find out why the job flagged them, because the flag is usually right. Note that a flag set by hand does not survive the next run of the job; if you want a permanent stop on a customer, set their credit limit rather than their flag.

Serial, batch or bin quantities do not match the line

What you see: the finalise is refused and the offending line is marked, naming the item.

Fix: complete the Serial Number, Batches or Bin sub-tab on that line so the allocated quantity equals the line quantity. If a delivery genuinely arrived short, change the line quantity — do not pad the allocation.

The transaction date is in a closed period

Fix: either date the document inside an open period, or ask whoever closes the books to reopen it. Do not back-date into a closed month to make it save.

Nothing happened

“I finalised it and my accounts did not move”

Check what document it was. On the sales side, a sales invoice, a POS cash bill or a Sales GIN Stock Out (created only through the API) is what moves stock and posts to the ledger. A quotation, a sales order, a goods delivery note and an outbound delivery order are all deliberately inert.

On the purchasing side, a standard goods received note records the count; the purchase invoice books the stock and the liability.

This is not a fault. See best practices for the full picture.

“It is FINAL, but there is no journal” — a message naming a missing GL code

What you see: the document reads FINAL and looks normal on the listing, but on its Posting tab the journal status is empty where a posted document reads POSTED, and the ledger has not moved. You meet the message — MISSING_DEFAULT_GL_CODE naming a code such as DEBTOR or CREDITOR, or COMPANY_DEFAULT_GL_CODE_NOT_EXIST — only when you trace the document and press Resolve.

What is happening: FINAL does not read your GL codes. It saves the status and starts the posting in the background, and the posting builds the journal from your company’s default GL codes. When the customer’s or supplier’s account is not mapped for that company (or the company has no defaults at all), the posting fails and the document stays FINAL with no journal. Nobody is told — the person who finalised it saw a normal FINAL.

Fix: in the Chart of Account applet, complete the company default GL code mapping — for the company this document belongs to. In a group with several companies this is usually the second or third company, where nobody finished the setup. Then open Financial Report › Error Checking › Trace Document, give it the document type and number, and press Resolve on Missing Journal. To find every document it happened to, Ledger And Journal › Error Checking › Missing Journal lists FINAL documents of one type with no journal, for a date range.

The quieter case: when the missing code is a sales, purchase or tax account, nothing fails at all. That line is left out and the customer’s or supplier’s line absorbs it, so a journal exists and Trace Document finds nothing. The sign is a receivable or payable account that no longer agrees with the ageing.

“MISSING_CASHBOOK” or “MISSING_GL_CODE” on a receipt, payment or transfer

What is happening: a settlement line’s method has no cashbook behind it, or that cashbook has no GL code. On a receipt, payment voucher or cash bill the message comes from the posting after FINAL: the document is FINAL and has no journal, as above (a receipt voucher has no Posting tab, so trace it by number). On a cash transfer it is part of FINAL itself: the transfer stays a draft.

Fix: map the settlement method to a cashbook with a GL code in the Cashbook applet, then Resolve the document in Trace Document (a cash transfer you simply finalise again). This is configuration, not something you can work around on the document.

“I raised it and nobody can see it”

It is a draft. A draft is invisible to everybody else and to every downstream screen — a draft sales order is not in the pick-pack queue, a draft invoice is not in any report, and a draft invoice will not appear when somebody searches for it on a receipt voucher.

“The customer paid but the invoice still shows outstanding”

The receipt voucher was finalised without a contra. The money is recorded and in the cashbook; it was just never applied to the invoice. Open the receipt and apply it on the Contra tab, or apply it from the Debtor Report.

“My price rule does nothing”

In this order:

1. Is the applet’s Default Pricebook set? Nothing in a price book is evaluated until the applet names it, and the setting is per applet. Then reload the applet — the book is read at start-up.
2. Is the price set ACTIVE? Only active price sets are evaluated. Note that the price book’s own Status field is not read at all.
3. Are you using a rule type that works? Item Category, Item Name Regex and the category regex rules never match; Company, Member Label, Currency and Settlement Method rules are treated as satisfied rather than evaluated; the Multi Line rules tab is not read by any calculator, so it never prices the line in front of you (a till reads it on a separate purchase-with-purchase pass); and a Relative Period date range never matches. See designing pricing rules.
4. Does the arithmetic make the price lower? A discount is only applied when the computed price is above zero and below the current price.

Things you cannot find

A document is missing from the listing

Listings are filtered by default — usually on posting status and a transaction-date window. This is the most common “missing document” in BigLedger and it is almost never a real loss.

Open Advanced Search, widen the date range, and clear the status filter.

An item cannot be selected on a document

Open it in Inventory Item Maintenance and look at FI Item Code on the Main tab. If it is blank, the item has no document-item twin and cannot go on any document. Items should be created from Doc Item Maintenance, which makes and links both records.

Also check the item’s branch and company linking — an item not linked to the company you are working in will not be offered.

If the item exists and is properly linked and item search still will not offer it, the search may be filtering on stock at this document’s location — see The stock quantity shows zero and there is stock on the shelf.

A customer, supplier or GL code is missing from a dropdown

Usually one of: it is inactive; it is not linked to this branch or company; or you do not hold read permission on it. Check in that order.

Numbers that look wrong

The quick ones are below. When two figures that should agree don’t, there are eight pages in this section devoted to it, each opening with a check you can run on the screen in front of you:

• When two numbers don’t tally — the way in, by symptom
• The aging still shows an invoice that’s already paid
• Everything is matched to zero and the reconciliation still won’t tally
• The Trial Balance doesn’t agree with the ledger
• The order still shows a quantity outstanding after I invoiced it all
• The margin report and the profit and loss don’t agree
• I knocked it off and the outstanding balance hasn’t changed
• The credit note is not in the aging report — raising one and applying it are two separate acts
• Which figures BigLedger stores, and which it works out fresh — the one behind all the others

Those eight lived under Modules → Core until 2026-09-19. They are tasks with a screen open, so they belong here; their old addresses still answer.

Stock, documents that will not change, and paper that comes out wrong

Three more pages in this section, each one a symptom people arrive with rather than a screen they are on:

• The stock quantity shows zero and there is stock on the shelf — every stock figure is per location, and item search can be set to offer only what it has stock for, so an item with none here vanishes rather than showing a zero
• I cannot edit a finalised invoice — what Final freezes, the three fields it deliberately does not, and the four honest ways to correct a posted document
• The invoice printed the wrong bank account — the bank details are template text chosen by branch, while the company name beside them comes from the document

Loyalty and membership

• Membership points and vouchers: symptom, cause, fix — points that never arrive, expiries that never run, vouchers rejected at the till, referral lineages that will not save

This one arrived from Modules → Membership → Best practices on 2026-09-20, for the same reason the eight above did. Its old address still answers.

Three pages that are not filed here answer troubleshooting-shaped questions anyway, because what they really explain is a mechanism the module owns. If your symptom is on this list, go straight to them: the same serial sold twice, or a serial showing quantity 2 — Serial numbers; cannot final — not enough stock for bundle item, or a bundle count that makes no sense — Bundles and grouped items; a document discount that has its own GL account, two header totals that do not add up, or a percentage that vanished — Group discount.

Available stock is lower than the stock balance

Correct and expected, and it is one of four reasons a stock figure is not the one you expected — the others are on The stock quantity shows zero and there is stock on the shelf. Open sales orders and delivery orders reduce the available quantity without moving the balance. If the gap is bigger than it should be, you have order lines that will never ship — close them in SO Line with SI KO, or void the orders.

The Trial Balance or Balance Sheet is empty

A Financial Report snapshot does not read your journals. It reads the per-account monthly summary rows that Month End Processing writes. Months that were never closed contribute nothing.

Run Month End Processing for the months in your range. To confirm that is the cause, run the ad-hoc Profit Loss Report instead — it reads journals directly, so if it shows numbers and the Trial Balance does not, unclosed months are your answer.

Two reports disagree

They usually read different document sets. The purchase report, for instance, reads only finalised purchase invoices and returns — no orders, no GRNs, no drafts. Check what each report reads on its applet reference page before assuming one is wrong.

Missing buttons, menus and applets

A useful rule of thumb:

• Greyed out usually means the data is not in a state that allows it — a Final button on a document with no lines, for example.
• Not there at all usually means a permission or a company setting. Many applets let an administrator hide the Final, Draft, Discard, Void and Print buttons, and whole menus, per role or per team.
• A whole applet missing from your launchpad means it is not enabled for your company or not installed for your login.

None of these is fixable from where you are standing. Ask whoever administers your tenant, and tell them the applet and the button.

The two diagnostic screens worth knowing

Both live in the Financial Report applet, under Error Checking:

• Trace Document answers why did this document post the way it did — or not at all. Give it a document and it shows you what happened. This is the first thing to reach for on any posting question, and it will usually end the conversation.
• Stock Flow Report compares your inventory value against your accounting value, per module. When stock and the ledger have drifted apart, this is what shows you where.

Most documents also carry a TraceDocument tab of their own, showing the journal and cashbook rows that finalising created. Open it once on a document you know is right, so you know what right looks like.

What success looks like

You have got what you need from this page if, faced with a stuck document, you do these three in order:

1. Read the message and match it against the sections above — it names the missing thing.
2. Check the posting status. Draft explains an enormous proportion of “nothing happened”.
3. Open Trace Document if it is a posting question at all.

Common mistakes

Where to ask

If none of this fixes it, open an issue at BigLedger-Support/public. Anyone can read the tracker, so keep your tenant code and your own records out of the post. Include:

• the applet you were in;
• the document type and its posting status — not its number;
• the exact message, copied rather than paraphrased;
• what you expected to happen.

Those four lines turn several days of correspondence into one reply. A question that needs your tenant or a document number to answer goes to your BigLedger contact (see Support).

Related documentation