What Finalise does with your tags, and where it stops — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

You tagged the document correctly. This lesson is about what happens to those tags a second later, which is not one thing but four different things, and about the one asymmetry that will stop your branch profit and loss tying to your debtors listing. Twelve minutes.

Step 1 — Know that Finalise is when the tags stop being editable facts

After this step you know why editing a master record fixes nothing. Finalise is not a save. It is its own call, and it hands the work to a processor that fans out to the postings — the journal, the stock movement, the cashbook and the rest. At that moment your place columns are copied onto every posting it writes. They are stamped, not referenced. Nothing looks them up again when a report runs. So changing a branch’s details afterwards, or correcting the tag on the document, changes nothing that has already posted, and a report drawn six months later reads the tag as it was on the day the button was pressed.

Reference: Organization — Where the figures on your reports come from

Step 2 — Know that revenue takes the line’s tag

After this step you can split an invoice across shops on purpose. The revenue line of the journal, and the tax and charge lines with it, take the branch and the profit centre from the document line they came from, and fall back to the header’s only when the line left them blank. That is what the line-level columns are for. One invoice can genuinely carry lines belonging to two branches, and the revenue really does split between them in the ledger. Bulk imports work the same way: a branch code per line, with the header’s used only where a line leaves it out.

Reference: Organization — Branch, profit centre, and the dimensions a document carries

Step 3 — Know that the debtor line does not

After this step you will design your reporting around a real constraint. The receivable line — the one that says this customer owes us the whole amount — always takes the header’s branch and the header’s profit centre. Always. There is no line-level fallback, because there is no line: it is one balancing entry for the whole document. So split one invoice across two branches and the revenue splits per line while the debtor balance lands whole on whichever branch the header names. Your branch profit and loss and your aged debtors listing will then disagree, correctly, and no amount of re-running either will reconcile them. Know that before somebody is asked to explain it.

Reference: Organization — Branch, profit centre, and the dimensions a document carries

Step 4 — Know the third rule, on the stock side

After this step the inventory picture is complete. The stock movement takes the document line’s branch with no fallback to the header at all — so a line that left the branch blank produces a movement with no branch tag, and it will be missing from anything grouped by branch. The location on that same movement behaves in the opposite way, falling back four deep until it finds somewhere: the line’s delivery location, the line’s store, the header’s store, then the branch’s default location. Stock always lands somewhere. The branch label on the movement is only ever what the line itself carried.

Reference: Organization — Branch, profit centre, and the dimensions a document carries

Step 5 — Know that a manual journal can carry no branch at all

After this step you can find the missing money. The journal line form requires an account and nothing else — the branch picker is there and the backend never checks it. So an adjusting entry posted at month end can be saved with no branch, sit in the trial balance perfectly happily, and be absent from every branch report. That is the single commonest reason a branch profit and loss is short by exactly one accrual. If you post manual journals, make filling in the branch part of the routine, because nothing will remind you and nothing will repair it afterwards.

Reference: Ledger And Journal — Journal — Line

Step 6 — Know where the tag stops travelling altogether

After this step you will not promise a branch breakdown that the document never carries. The tag reaches the journal, the stock movement and the cashbook. It does not always reach the tax authority. There are two automatic consolidation runs for e-invoicing, and the common one groups your cash sales by company and document type only — it sets no branch on the consolidated document at all, so the branch simply does not appear on the finished e-invoice. The run that does partition by branch exists, and it is rarely the one on a schedule. If somebody expects to reconcile submitted e-invoices branch by branch, establish which run your tenant is on first.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — 3. Pools — what the buttons do

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Know that Finalise is when the tags stop being editable facts"]
  s2["Step 2 — Know that revenue takes the line's tag"]
  s3["Step 3 — Know that the debtor line does not"]
  s4["Step 4 — Know the third rule, on the stock side"]
  s5["Step 5 — Know that a manual journal can carry no branch at all"]
  s6["Step 6 — Know where the tag stops travelling altogether"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Why your branch profit and loss does not foot · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation