Recording your first journal entry

The Simple Entry Layer, or SEL, is the only screen most owners need. Choose whether the transaction is income, expense, transfer or a loan, then enter the amount, the party and the date. SEL is built so that the source and destination accounts are mandatory, which means the entry cannot be incomplete.

This design follows the product rule that incomplete entries are not allowed. Every transaction must have a clear where-from and where-to before it can be saved.

Real business is rarely one-to-one. One customer may pay in cash and bKash for the same bill, or one expense may cover several categories. SEL supports multi-source splits, so a single entry can distribute money across many COA accounts.

After the split is saved, the JRN engine still posts the whole record as a balanced journal. This makes it possible to handle complex receipts without asking the user to create multiple vouchers.

The Party Wallets, or PTW, module records every amount tied to a person. If you give an advance to a supplier, pay a staff loan or collect a customer deposit, PTW shows the running balance and a dual history of who entered the record and who the money belongs to.

On-Behalf-Of, or OBO, lets you tag an entry as business, personal or home. This is useful when the owner mixes money across accounts. At month end, settlement runs separate these categories so the books stay clean and the owner wallet is not confused with company cash.

Once SEL captures the data, the JRN auto-posting bridge takes over. It reads the COA mapping, applies the posting rules and writes the double-entry lines. The user never touches the journal, but the books are still complete.

All posted journal lines live in the ERP DB and feed every report, from trial balance to profit and loss. Reports are always calculated from posted data, never from a cached balance.

Mistakes happen. When you edit a posted entry, the JRN engine does not overwrite the old rows. It creates a reversal of the original journal and then re-posts the corrected version. The full history is kept.

This protects your audit trail. Your accountant can see what changed, when it changed and who changed it, which is critical for tax and compliance reviews.

After a few entries, open the trial balance or ledger view. Every SEL entry should appear through its COA account in the general ledger. If something looks wrong, fix it early while the period is still open.

Remember that the trial balance is the fastest way to see whether your books are in balance. If it is not, the issue is usually a missing account or an unsaved split.