Day-to-Day Usage

Nobody uses all of BigLedger. You use the six or seven screens your job needs, and you open them in roughly the same order every day. This page is that rhythm.

First: build your own workspace

Before anything else, spend five minutes making a launchpad view — a named set of just the applets you use, in the order you use them, set as your default. You can keep up to ten views. See finding your way around.

Everything below assumes you have done that. Without it you will scroll past forty icons every morning.

A day, by role

If you take orders. Raise sales orders as customers ask; finalise them, because a draft order is invisible to the warehouse. Check the ones you finalised yesterday actually reached the Pick Pack Queue.

If you work the warehouse. Open the Pick Pack Queue and Delivery Items first thing: those are today’s work, and only FINAL orders appear on them. Receive deliveries as they arrive, count before you type, and finalise the goods received note the same day.

If you work the counter. POS all day; Cashier Collection and the Z Report at the end of it.

If you do accounts receivable. Raise invoices from the orders rather than typing them. Enter receipts as the bank shows them, and contra each one against its invoice — that is the step that clears the balance. Watch the ageing on the Debtor Report.

If you do accounts payable. Enter supplier bills by knocking off the goods received notes. Check quantity and price against the supplier’s paperwork before finalising, because finalising is what books the stock and the liability.

A weekly pass, twenty minutes

Five screens, once a week, and most month-end pain disappears:

1. Purchase Order Queue — anything older than your longest genuine lead time is a conversation with a supplier.
2. SO Line with SI KO — order lines that will never be invoiced. Close them; each one is permanently eating into available stock.
3. Debtor Report ageing — who is drifting, before they drift far.
4. Draft documents — widen a listing’s Advanced Search to show drafts. Old drafts are work somebody abandoned.
5. Bank reconciliation — a week’s worth is an hour; a month’s worth is a day.

Month end

• Every goods received note for the month finalised, and every supplier invoice entered.
• Bank accounts reconciled.
• Receivables and payables ageing reviewed.
• Goods received but not invoiced reviewed — the gap the standard receipt path deliberately creates.
• Month End Processing run in the Financial Report applet, for each set of books.

About bank reconciliation

BigLedger has an auto-matcher that proposes matches between your cashbook lines and your bank statement, using a weighting you can configure per cashbook. It proposes; you confirm.

The cashbook lines it matches are the ones your receipt and payment vouchers created when they were finalised — which is why the date on a receipt should be the date the money arrived, not the date you typed it. A receipt dated wrongly is a reconciliation that will not match.

See the bank reconciliation guide.

Habits worth having

• Finalise the same day. Drafts are invisible, and a week-old draft is a week-old problem.
• Never re-key a document that already exists. Use Search Document, KO For, or Import. The link is what closes the earlier document and what lets anybody match quantities later.
• Put the customer’s or supplier’s own reference in the header. In six weeks that is how you find the document from their paperwork.
• Use the date the thing happened, not the date you are typing.
• Export instead of retyping. Almost every grid exports to Excel or PDF from its own status bar.

What success looks like

At the end of a good week:

1. The Pick Pack Queue holds only work that is genuinely still to do.
2. No invoice raised this week is showing its full amount outstanding for a customer who has paid.
3. The Purchase Order Queue has nothing on it older than a real lead time.

Common mistakes

Related documentation