Setting up your books

Where

Financials → Ledger & Accounts → Chart of Accounts

Plan

Professional and above

Permission

Accounting → Chart Of Account

Your books start empty on purpose — which accounts a business posts to is a decision the app will not make for you. Two buttons do most of the work.

You need the Professional plan for this

Chart of Accounts is Professional, while Posting Profiles is Growth. A Growth shop can open the posting-profile screen but cannot reach the screen that creates the accounts those profiles must point at, so in practice the whole setup needs Professional.

How to create your chart of accounts

1. Go to Financials → Ledger & Accounts → Chart of Accounts.
2. Click Seed defaults.
3. Choose Simple chart (lean) — 67 accounts, right for most shops — or Robust chart (comprehensive) at 149 accounts.
4. You will be told how many were created.

Both give you the same eight groups — Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Revenue, Cost of Sales, Operating Costs, Other Expenses, Non-Operating Income — with the usual accounts under each.

Running it again is safe. It only adds what is missing and never touches accounts you already have.

To add one by hand, click New account and give it a Code, a Name and an Account type.

How to tell the app which accounts to post to

A posting profile is one rule: “when this kind of paperwork happens, this part of the amount goes to this account.” A sale’s revenue goes to Sales Revenue, its cost to Cost of Goods Sold, and so on. There are over two hundred of these rules.

1. Seed your chart of accounts first — the profiles need accounts to point at.
2. Go to Financials → Ledger & Accounts → Posting Profiles.
3. Click Seed defaults and confirm.

Each rule binds to the first suitable account it finds in your chart. If none exists, that rule is quietly skipped — which is why a Simple chart ends up with fewer rules than a Robust one.

This screen shows internal names

The Document type and Account role dropdowns display raw identifiers like work_order_material_consumption rather than English, and nothing marks which rules are required. It is readable with effort, but it is not a screen to hand to a non-technical member of staff.

Why this matters more than it looks

Without posting profiles, twenty kinds of document post nothing — silently

If a rule is missing, the app abandons the whole accounting entry and carries on. No error, no warning. The document completes, stock moves, the customer’s balance updates. Only the bookkeeping is skipped.

It affects customer invoices and payments, credit sales, credit notes, expenses, incomes, bank deposits and withdrawals, tax filings, opening customer and supplier balances, supplier returns, and every kind of stock movement.

The result: your Trial Balance, Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, General Ledger and account balances will all read zero, because every one of them is built purely from accounting entries. Everything else in the app looks perfectly healthy.

The worst case is a partly mapped setup, where a goods return posts the money side and not the stock side.

If your reports look empty, check here first. Also check the settings Auto posting enabled and Post inventory to GL — switching either off produces identical symptoms.

How to bring balances over from your old system

Do it in this order.

1. Record your cut-over date

1. Go to Financials → Financial Transactions → Books Opening Settings.
2. Click Configure.
3. Set Books opened on to your go-live date and pick 3900 Opening Balance Equity as the Opening balance equity account.
4. Save.

“Lock books” does not lock anything

The Lock books button warns that locking cannot be undone. In fact it enforces nothing — opening balances stay fully editable afterwards. The only change is that the Edit and Lock buttons disappear from that one card.

The Lock reason it displays can never be filled in either; there is no field for it.

2. Bring in what customers owe you

Go to Financials → Financial Transactions → Opening Customer Balances, add one per customer, and post it. This genuinely posts, and updates the customer’s account.

3. Bring in what you owe suppliers

The same, under Opening Vendor Balances.

4. Bring in everything else with one journal entry

Do not use the “Opening Balances” screen — it does nothing

Financials → Financial Transactions → Opening Balances looks like exactly the right place, and it is a dead end. Marking a row Posted changes a badge from grey to green and writes nothing to your accounts. The figures never reach the General Ledger, the Trial Balance or the Balance Sheet.

Use a journal entry instead, as below.

1. Go to Financials → Ledger & Accounts → Journal Entries and click New entry.
2. Set the Entry date to the day before you go live.
3. Describe it as “Opening balances brought forward”.
4. Add one line per account from your old trial balance — debit the assets, credit the liabilities — picking the Account and typing into Debit or Credit.
5. Balance the whole thing against 3900 Opening Balance Equity. The footer must read Balanced.
6. Save.

5. Set up your year

Create the fiscal year under Financials → Fiscal Setup → Fiscal Years, then create each period under Accounting Periods.

Two things about periods to know now

Creating a fiscal year does not create its months. Twelve months means twelve separate dialogs, every year. There is no generate button.

Closing a fiscal year blocks nothing. Only an accounting period’s status is ever checked, so you must close each month individually. Closing the year is cosmetic.

Note also that if no period covers a date, posting into it is allowed. A month you never created has no protection at all.

Closing a period refuses anything dated into it — and because the refusal aborts the whole document, dating a sale, a journal entry or a bill into a closed month fails the document outright. That is a very different symptom from a missing posting profile, which fails silently.

A second, separate rule also limits how far back you can date

Period closing is not the only thing that refuses a date. Every dated document in the app — including journal entries, bills, receipts and expenses — is also held inside a dating window measured from today, five days back by default. The two are independent: a date can sit in an open period and still be too far back for the window, and a date inside the window can still land in a month you have closed. The refusal message tells you which one stopped you.

Set the window under Settings → Business → Workspace settings, or per company or branch. See Document dates and how far they can move.

Other setup screens

Screen	What it does
Cost Centers	Tags journal lines by branch or department. Only produces a report if you also build a budget.
Exchange Rates	Rates for multi-currency trading. Genuinely used.
Payment Terms	Nothing reads it. See below.

Payment Terms feeds nothing

The screen lets you define Net 30 and early-payment discounts, and no document in the app references any of it. No invoice, bill, sale or purchase order has a payment-terms field.

Real due dates come from the Payment terms days number on the customer’s or supplier’s own record. Set it there.

Exchange rates are typed in by hand unless your host enabled the feed

There is a working daily rate feed, but it is off unless whoever hosts your system turned it on at deployment, and there is no switch for it in the app.

Two oddities if it is on: fed rates are saved for the whole business rather than one company, so they do not appear in this list even though the app uses them; and the Source dropdown lets you label a hand-typed rate “Auto feed”, which means nothing.

Related

• Financial reports
• Income and expenses
• Tax