Manual journals
A manual journal posts directly to the ledger. Use it for the things no document covers: accruals and prepayments, depreciation you are handling yourself, corrections your accountant has asked for, allocations between departments, and opening adjustments.
Anything a document can do, a document should do. An invoice records a sale properly, links it to a customer, ages it and can be emailed. A journal that mimics one does none of that.
Writing one
Add lines, each with an account and either a debit or a credit. The entry must balance before it can be published.
- Every line can carry its own description, so the account register reads sensibly later.
- Lines hitting receivables or payables must name a customer or supplier. Without that, your ageing report and your balance sheet would disagree, which is a difference nobody can explain afterwards.
- Lines can carry reporting tags, so a journal appears correctly in departmental and project reports.
- A location can be set for the whole entry or per line.
Draft, then publish
A journal starts as a draft. A draft posts nothing: its lines sit on the journal itself and no report can see them. This is what lets you write one now, check it, and publish it when you are ready.
Publishing is the moment the lines become part of the ledger. From then on the journal cannot be edited.
The journal keeps the same number throughout. It does not get renumbered when you publish, because a number that changes is not much use as a reference.
Correcting a published journal
Void it. Upscale posts the exact opposite entry, dated when you choose, and leaves the original where it is.
Posted lines are never edited or deleted. If they were, a report you ran last week could give a different answer today with nothing to show why. Voiding leaves both the original and the reversal visible, which is what an auditor expects to find.
To fix a published journal: void it, then post a corrected one.
Recurring journals
A journal you post every month, such as releasing a month of prepaid insurance or accruing rent, can be set to post itself.
Set the schedule, then choose what happens each period:
- Post it straight to the ledger, or
- Leave it as a draft for someone to review and publish
Draft is the safer default for anything whose amount might stop being true. A journal that posts itself unattended for a year is how a ledger fills with accruals nobody has checked.
Each occurrence is generated once. If a run is interrupted, it will not be duplicated when it resumes.
Reporting basis
A journal is normally an accrual event, which is the default. Where it records something that is also a real movement of money, you can mark it as applying to both bases so it appears in cash basis reports too.