The general ledger
Every invoice you send, expense you record, bill you pay and deposit you make writes a balanced pair of entries into the general ledger. The ledger is the record; the reports are views of it. When a number looks wrong, this is where you find out why.
Growth and up for the workspace and account registers (reports.view).
Editing the chart of accounts needs accounting.manage. The journal browser
is Professional and up.
Where it lives
Books → Accounting is the workspace. It holds:
- Chart of accounts - the categories, with live balances
- Account register - every entry that hit one account, with a running balance
- Journal - every entry, in the order it was posted
- Close, Year end and Opening balances - the period work
Reading an account register
Open any account from the chart of accounts. You get every line that touched it, oldest first, with a running balance in the right-hand column and the closing balance in the header.
The register paginates, and the running balance carries across pages - so the figure on page three is the real balance at that line, not a page-local total.
Drilling to the document
Every entry knows what produced it. A line posted by invoice INV-2841 links back to that invoice; one posted by a bill links to the bill. Click through rather than searching.
It works the other way too. Invoices, bills, expenses and deposits carry a Journal entries card listing every entry they produced - the original, any reversal, and any repost. That card appears only when the native ledger is active; in QuickBooks mode the ledger lives in QuickBooks and the card would be showing you nothing.
Nothing is ever edited
The ledger is append-only. There is no edit and no delete - a correction is a reversal plus a new entry, and both stay visible. That is deliberate: a set of books you can quietly rewrite is not evidence of anything.
So a mistake is not a problem to hide. Reverse it, post the right one, and the register tells the true story of what happened and when.
What posts automatically
You do not hand-write entries for ordinary work. Invoices, payments, expenses, bills, bill payments, deposits and refunds all post themselves, using the accounts mapped in Settings → Finances → Books. Manual journal entries are for the things no document covers - depreciation, an owner contribution, a reclassification.