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.

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.

The detail reports

The register view above is one account at a time. Under Reports → Financial statements the same lines come as whole reports:

• General Ledger - every account’s register for the period. Filter accounts narrows it to the accounts or account types you pick, and the CSV and workbook downloads carry the same filter, so the file is the screen.
• Profit & Loss Detail - every income-statement account as a register. Each account opens the period at zero and closes at the P&L’s own figure for it; year-end closing entries are left out, as the income statement leaves them out. On the cash basis the report-time adjustments sit beneath each account’s posted lines, so it foots to the cash statement.
• Balance Sheet Detail - every balance account as a register, from its opening balance to the balance sheet’s figure. Closing entries stay in - retained earnings is a funded account here - and the net income not yet closed prints last, because the balance accounts only foot with it.
• Journal - every entry of the period in posting order with its debit and credit lines, or one row per entry as a Transaction list. It takes the journal browser’s filters, and the window’s debits and credits are totalled from the whole period, never from the page. Growth and up (nativeLedger), like the journal itself.

Every one of these says when its screen was cut by the row cap, and every closing balance stays exact when it was: the balances come from the ledger’s aggregates, not from the rows on screen. The downloads print the whole register.

Ratios, notes and packs

Three things sit on top of the statements rather than inside them, and all three read the same ledger figures:

• Financial Ratios — a report on the hub: margins, liquidity, leverage, days sales outstanding and revenue per completed job, each computed from statement totals it names, with the previous period beside it. A ratio the books cannot answer says why instead of printing a number.
• Notes — under every statement, a note kept with the period it is about, printed under the statement in the PDF and on its own sheet in the workbook. Paragraphs, bold and bullets; nothing else, and nothing ever interpreted as HTML.
• Report packs — several statements and reports built together as one PDF or workbook with a cover, contents, page numbers and each period’s notes, from a template or your own sections, built now or on a schedule. Professional.

The Reports page has the details of each.

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.

Related

• Journal entries
• Chart of accounts
• Closing the books