Financial Accounting Module

Nothing in this module is typed into a ledger by hand except a manual journal. The General Ledger is the running total of journals, and almost every journal is written by the server the moment a document somewhere else reaches FINAL. Everything in this module either writes those journals, settles the customer and supplier balances they create, proves the bank agrees, or reads the result back as a statement.

Applets in this module

Membership is an editorial judgement — the product has no module↔applet relationship in its data — and it is written down in planning/specs/module-applet-membership.md. Financial Accounting owns 18 registry applets; 16 are documented. The two undocumented rows are migration connectors whose status is an open question (see the last table).

The ledger

Money in, money out

Proving the bank

Who owes whom

Assets, treasury, budget

Tax

Migration connectors — status open

Until that is decided, no page in this module describes an AutoCount or SQL Account import.

Applets it depends on

Finance has no master data of its own. Everything below is owned by the Core module and read at FINAL by the documents in this one.

The documents that post into this module from other modules are listed under What posts to the ledger.

What posts to the ledger — and what does not

The server builds a document’s journal from one table, JournalPostingTypeHandler.handlers, which has seven entries. If a document type is not in that table — or does not fall through to one by name — it does not post through this path, whatever a page elsewhere says.

    flowchart LR
  subgraph docs["Document reaches FINAL"]
    SI["Sales Invoice, Cash Bill,<br/>Sales Return, Credit/Debit Note"]
    PI["Purchase Invoice,<br/>Purchase Return, Debit/Credit Note"]
    GRN["Purchase GRN Stock In"]
    RV["Receipt Voucher"]
    PV["Payment Voucher"]
    CON["Consignment purchase documents"]
    ADJ["Stock Adjustment"]
  end
  H["JournalPostingTypeHandler<br/>SALES · PURCHASE · INTERNAL_PURCHASE_GRN_STOCK_IN<br/>INTERNAL_RECEIPT_VOUCHER · INTERNAL_PAYMENT_VOUCHER<br/>PURCHASE_CONSIGNMENT · INTERNAL_STOCK_ADJUSTMENT"]
  J["AUTO journal in<br/>Ledger And Journal"]
  docs --> H --> J
  MJ["Manual journal / CSV import"] --> J
  CT["Cash Transfer (FINAL)"] --> J
  FA["Fixed Asset Transactions tab"] --> J
  ME["Month End Processing:<br/>closing-day and opening-day journals"] --> J
  

Every handler resolves the GL code the same way — GL code on the line → GL code on the header → item-company link → company default — and every journal is checked before it is written: unequal debits and credits throw TOTAL_DEBITS_AND_TOTAL_CREDITS_NOT_BALANCES, an empty journal throws NO_JOURNAL_CREATED, and a missing entity default (DEBTOR*, CREDITOR*) throws MISSING_DEFAULT_GL_CODE: <key>. In all three cases the document does not finalise. VOID of a posted document writes a mirror journal with every debit and credit swapped, carrying the original document’s transaction date — only the posting timestamp is today, so voiding a January invoice in March moves January. See What a Void Undoes.

Three more things write journals without a handler: a manual journal (keyed or imported in Ledger And Journal, validated balanced on the server), a Cash Transfer at FINAL (Dr the receiving cashbook’s GL / Cr the sending one’s), and the Fixed Asset Transactions tab (acquisition, adjustment, disposal), which assembles the lines in the browser and posts them directly.

What does not post

Say this to anyone who tells you otherwise:

• A sale posts no cost of goods sold. The SALES handler has no stock line. The only code that writes a COGS journal is the month-end cost-of-goods-sold processor — and its button is commented out of the Month End Processing screen, so it is reachable only by API. The ad-hoc Profit Loss Report computes cost of sales live from the sales lines instead; the frozen snapshot shows only what has been journalled.
• The depreciation run writes journals with no lines. The processor adds each line only when the asset’s depreciation sub-ledger columns are set, and nothing in the applet or the backend ever sets them. The run completes, the journal header exists, and the ledger does not move. Until that is fixed, monthly depreciation is a manual journal — see the Journal Entries Guide.
• A Reimbursement Payment Voucher raises no creditor and no tax line — its type is not in the handler table and does not fall through by name.
• Bank Reconciliation, Statement of Account, the three debtor/creditor report applets, Budgetary, Deposit and MY-SST post nothing. They read FINAL documents and write their own tables (links, runs, registers, tax snapshots).
• A plain Purchase GRN, a Sales GIN and a Sales GRN post nothing (amount signum 0). The plain GRN records receipt; the Purchase Invoice books the stock.
• A claim posts nothing — the claims domain has no handler and no signums; money leaves through a Payment Voucher or a payroll file. See the Claims module.
• Nothing in this module routes for approval. There is no approval engine for journals, receipt vouchers or payment vouchers; the generic engine covers Purchase Order, Purchase Requisition and Stock Requisition only, and is off until configured. Segregation of duties on a Payment Voucher is a permissions decision — give the create right and the finalise right to different roles.

Month-end, in the order the system expects

1. Finalise everything. A DRAFT document is not in the ledger, not in the debtor or creditor reports, not in the cashbook and not in any statement. Manual journals are live on save.
2. Reconcile the cashbooks. One Bank Reconciliation session per cashbook and month; Report 3 is the evidence. Bank charges and interest you find on the statement are entered as a Payment or Receipt Voucher (which creates the cashbook line the matcher needs) — a manual journal does not create a cashbook line and will never match.
3. Month End Processing in Financial Report, once per Set of Books per month. It writes the closing-day and opening-day journals and the per-account monthly summaries. The Financial Report snapshot reads only those summaries — an empty Trial Balance almost always means the month was never processed, not that the journals are missing.
4. Create or regenerate the Financial Report snapshot. Snapshots are frozen when created; after any back-dated posting, PROCESS the month again, then REGENERATE.
5. Lock the period in Chart of Account > Fiscal Year. LOCK_GL stops manual journals (auto journals still post); LOCK_TXN stops operational documents being dated into the month; LOCK_ALL stops both. Anyone who can open Chart of Account can set a period back to OPEN — there is no approval on reopening.

The Financial Reporting Guide walks this through for the running example, and the Month-end closing tutorial is the short version.

Where the balances come from

Each of those is worked out live, from the rows underneath it. The figures on your reports mostly are not — the Trial Balance, Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet read a stored monthly summary, and the historical aging reads a monthly photograph. Which figures BigLedger stores, and which it works out fresh explains which is which across all five subsystems that make that trade-off, and how to tell a stale figure from a wrong one. If you already have a figure that will not tally, start instead from the symptom: when two numbers don’t tally.

The three are maintained separately. A receipt voucher moves all of the first three at once; a manual journal moves only the third. That is why “the GL bank balance is right but the cashbook is wrong” and “the customer’s statement is right but the debtor control account is wrong” are different problems with different fixes.

Reports in this module

What has no report. There is no cash flow statement, no consolidated group statement (one snapshot per Set of Books; combine outside BigLedger), no cost-of-sales-by-item report other than the Gross Profit listing behind the Profit Loss Report, and no budget commitment or reserved-amount report (the reserved_amt column exists and nothing writes to it).

Guides for this module

• Chart of Accounts Setup Guide — sections, categories, codes, default GL codes, the first fiscal year.
• Set of Books, Fiscal Years and Fiscal Periods — which ledgers a report reads, which dates a document is still accepted for, and how to set them up for a group of companies.
• Financial Report Structure — which profit and loss or balance sheet line a GL code lands on, and how to add a category so its figures appear.
• Opening Balance Migration — stock, AR, AP, cashbook and GL balances, in the order the dependencies require.
• Journal Entries Guide — accruals, the monthly depreciation journal, corrections, cloning.
• Bank Reconciliation Guide — one month, one cashbook, one variance found and booked.
• Financial Reporting Guide — month-end processing, snapshots, the branch comparison, locking the period.

Related documentation

• Core module — the master data every posting reads.
• Sales module, Point of Sale module, Purchasing module, Inventory module — the documents that post into this ledger.
• E-Invoice module — what happens to a finalised invoice after it posts.
• Document approvals — the one generic approval engine, and why nothing in finance uses it.