There is a version of small-business software where invoicing and accounting are separate products that you reconcile against each other once a month, usually badly. This is not that. Every invoice, payment, refund and stock movement writes its own double-entry journal as it happens, so your accounts are not something you produce at the end of a period — they are already there.
What you can do
- Work from a standard chart of accounts for your country, or your own.
- Have journals posted automatically from invoices, purchases, payments and stock movements.
- Import your bank statement and match transactions against outstanding invoices.
- Post manual journals for the things software cannot know about — accruals, corrections, opening balances.
- Reverse a posted entry rather than editing it, so the audit trail stays intact.
- Produce the tax return figures for your regime, and see how each box was arrived at.
- Read the standard reports — trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet, aged receivables.
How it works in practice
Pick your chart of accounts once (Settings → Ledger accounts). Common national schemes are included — SKR03, SKR04 and SKR07 for Germany, RGS for the Netherlands, French GAAP, and a general default — so most businesses start from something familiar rather than building a chart from nothing. Add or rename accounts to suit how you actually work.
Then mostly forget about it. Raising an invoice posts revenue, receivables and tax. Registering a payment clears the receivable and moves the money to the bank account. Buying stock posts the asset; selling it posts the cost. You did not open the accounting screen for any of that.
Import the bank and reconcile (Finance → Bank). Upload a statement — the structured formats your bank exports, or a spreadsheet you map once — and each line is offered against the open invoices it might settle. Confirm a match and the payment is registered, the invoice marked paid, and the journal written. Lines that clearly match one open invoice can be booked in a batch.
Post manual journals when you need to (Finance → Journals). Drafts can be edited and checked; once posted, an entry is permanent. To undo one you reverse it, which leaves both the original and the reversal visible. That is deliberate — books you can quietly edit are books nobody can rely on.
Prepare the tax return (Finance → Tax). The figures come from the same journals, so a return and the accounts it summarizes cannot disagree. Each box can be opened to see the transactions behind it, which is the part that matters when someone questions a number.
Good to know
- Posted entries are never edited or deleted, only reversed. People new to double-entry sometimes read this as the software being inflexible. It is the opposite: it is what makes the numbers trustworthy, and every accounting system worth using behaves this way.
- Bank import quality depends on your bank’s export. Structured formats match far better than a CSV of free-text descriptions, and reconciliation is only as good as the reference your customer typed.
- A wrong chart of accounts is painful to change later. It is worth ten minutes with your accountant before you start rather than after your first quarter.
- Automatic posting needs accounts set on your products and tax codes. The defaults cover most cases; unusual ones will want checking before your first month-end.