Accounting & finance

For the accountant, the finance manager and the owner — and, for Expenses only, supervisors and managers. Accounting in the management navigation (/accounting, accounting.view) opens the finance overview; everything below is in its side navigation.

The books keep themselves: every sale, payment, refund, stock movement, till movement, gift card, supplier invoice and payment records a money fact in the same transaction, and the posting run turns it into a journal entry within the minute. You record what the tills cannot know — expenses, bank movements, statements, adjustments, opening balances — and close the months.

Finance overview

Month to date: net sales (after discounts and refunds), gross profit and margin, net profit, VAT due; sales and profit for six months; cash and bank balances (each opens its ledger); what customers owe and what the business owes suppliers; Needs attention (expenses waiting for approval, statement lines to reconcile, suspense to classify, posting stopped, integrity checks); the posting status.

Journals and entries

Journals lists every entry — sales, purchases, cash, bank, inventory and general journals — with filters for dates, branch, kind (automatic, manual, adjustment, correction, reversal, opening), status (posted, drafts, posted late) and a search by number, memo or document. An entry shows where it came from (the order, payment, receipt, invoice… with a link), its lines with customer / supplier / document, and its reversals and corrections.

New journal (accounting.post●): date, journal, kind (a manual journal; an adjustment needs a reason; an opening balance), memo and lines. Debits must equal credits — the footer says Out by … until they do, and Post stays off. Lines on receivables need the customer, on payables the supplier. Save draft keeps it editable; posting numbers it (JE-…) and it can then never be edited or deleted:

• Reverse posts the exact opposite (on the date you choose, with a reason). An entry is reversed once.
• Correct posts the reversal and the right entry together, linked to the original.
• An entry the system posted can only be reclassified — the same amounts to other accounts (a sale to venue hire instead of food, say), never cash, bank, receivables, payables, stock or customer balances: those are corrected at their source (void the payment, cancel the invoice, reopen the order), and the books follow.

General ledger and chart of accounts

General ledger: one account, a date range and branch — the opening balance, every line with its entry and source, the running balance and the closing balance. CSV export.

Chart of accounts: the accounts by type with their balances; system accounts (marked) are found by their role, so they can be renamed and renumbered. New account adds your own (e.g. a second rent account). Posting map decides where money goes: each payment method’s clearing or bank account, each till’s cash account, each menu category’s revenue account, each tax’s liability, each service charge’s income, the catering charge categories and the stock classes.

Banking and reconciliation

Banking (accounting.bank): the bank and mobile-money accounts with their balances, the cash and money in transit, Money moved and the statements.

• Bank account — name, bank, last digits, branch; each gets its own ledger account (1101…, mobile money 1150…).
• Record movement — cash banked (safe → bank), a transfer, a withdrawal, a provider settlement (card / MoMo takings arriving net of the provider’s fee: the gross clears the clearing account, the fee is a bank charge), a charge or interest. Reversal with a reason (not while it is matched on a statement).
• Import statement — a CSV from the bank (date, description, reference, money in / out or a signed amount, balance; newest-first files and decimal commas are understood; problems are reported by line) or typed lines, with the opening and closing balances. Lines that match one ledger line exactly (same amount, within three days) are matched on import.

Reconcile a statement: the summary shows the balance in the books, what is in the books but not yet on the bank, what the bank should show and the statement’s closing balance; the difference says how much of it is lines still to match. For each line: Pick the ledger lines it pays (one or several), Create the entry from the line (an SMS fee → bank charges, interest → interest income, an unrecorded settlement → its clearing account), or Ignore it with a note (a charge the bank reversed). Complete is possible when every line is settled and the statement agrees with the books. The first statement of an account starts its reconciliation: if its opening balance disagrees with the books on that day, post the missing opening balance first.

Expenses and petty cash

Expenses (expenses.create; approving expenses.approve●): what the business spends outside supplier invoices. Record expense: category (any expense or cost-of-sales account, a prepayment or a fixed asset — stock bought for cash is recorded as a goods receipt in procurement, and the staff share of the service charge is paid out by journal), what for, the amount paid as on the receipt, the VAT on the receipt (reclaimable only with a VAT receipt), paid to, the supplier if one, paid from — an open till (cash out of the drawer now) or the safe, petty cash or a bank account — the receipt number and a photo or PDF of the receipt.

Above the approval limit (500,000 by default) an expense waits, and no money moves, until someone with expenses.approve — never the person who recorded it, even if they could approve it themselves — approves it. A posted expense can be reversed (the cash goes back into the till while that till is open, else to the account you choose) or its category changed (a correction entry).

The petty cash report shows the box at the start and now, every movement in and out of it and every payout from a till, with any payout recorded without a category (those post to uncategorised payouts for you to reclassify).

Receivables and payables

Receivables: what customers owe — house-account tabs and orders invoiced on credit — from the receivables ledger, so the total is always the balance-sheet figure. Buckets by due date (not yet due, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90 days), balances by customer with their credit limit, the open items (payments clear the oldest charges first) and the house accounts. Receive records a payment on account (method, amount, reference) as a takings document and brings the tab down.

Payables: approved supplier invoices and credit notes not yet settled, by supplier and due date; Pay suppliers opens procurement’s payment screen, where the payment’s Paid from account is chosen.

Financial reports

Every report reads the posted ledger, exports CSV (audited; a cell that looks like a formula is neutralised) and prints: trial balance (opening, debits, credits, closing — debits equal credits), profit & loss (sales, discounts & refunds, net sales, cost of sales, gross profit, operating expenses, operating and net profit; food and beverage cost %; compared with the period before or the year before — month to date compares with the same days of last month), balance sheet (profit this fiscal year computed; assets = liabilities + equity), cash flow (direct method; ties to the cash and bank balances), VAT (output VAT charged and returned on refunds, input VAT claimed, the net due; payments to the authority and journals shown apart; excise and withholding tax listed on their own), expense report, receivables and payables ageing, inventory valuation (ledger vs stock by class and store), service charges (collected, staff share owed, paid out), petty cash, integrity checks (14 checks that the ledger agrees with the tills, stock, suppliers, gift cards, wallets, deposits, loyalty, house accounts and the tips owed to staff; stock may differ from the ledger by rounding — each movement is valued to the shilling, so up to half a shilling a movement — which the check allows and shows in grey), the general ledger and the day books.

Periods and closing a month

Periods & close (accounting.close_period●): the fiscal year’s months. A month can be locked once it is over. Lock first checks what could still change the month — money facts waiting or failed, offline sales not yet synced, sync conflicts, tills still open, draft journals, earlier months open, statements not reconciled. Blockers can be overridden only with a reason. A locked month refuses manual entries; a sale synced late from an offline till posts on the first open day after it, flagged late with the day it happened — the locked figures never move. Reopen needs a reason; both are in the audit trail.

Go-live: opening balances

Opening balances (accounting.post●): the balances the business held when its books started. Figures the system already knows are suggested — stock by class, supplier invoices approved and unpaid, gift cards, wallets, deposits and house accounts — less anything already in the ledger; count in the cash and bank balances; the difference goes to opening balance equity. Tick the books start the next day so facts dated before are covered by the opening balances and not posted again.

Posting log

Every money fact with its entry (or why it needed none — a complimentary order has nothing to post). If a posting fails the line stops at that fact — later facts may depend on it — and Retry runs it again once fixed; a fact that can never post is skipped with a reason (kept in the audit trail) and what it should have posted entered as a journal. Post now runs the queue at once.

Dates

Journals, expenses and bank movements are dated today or earlier, never before the books start (opening balances excepted); a reversal is never dated before the entry it reverses. Sales from an offline till keep the time they were rung up and paid on the terminal.