Where the numbers come from

You’ll need: Journal entry reports — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

This lesson explains the machinery, because understanding it turns the reports from magic into something you can check.

There is no separate ledger to post to

Nobody in your business writes journal entries. There is no month-end posting run, and no book of entries sitting alongside your operational records waiting to be kept in step.

Instead, the entries are derived from what already happened whenever a report is run. Your invoices, your transactions and your stock movements are the source; the journal is the reading of them.

That has two consequences worth understanding.

Good: the accounts cannot drift away from operations. There is no posting step to forget and no reconciliation between “the system” and “the accounts”, because they are the same records.

Also true: the quality of your accounts is exactly the quality of your day-to-day recording. There is no separate accounting stage that fixes things later. A payment with the wrong operation type is wrong on the income statement, and the only place to fix it is the payment.

What contributes

Six sources feed the journal:

Invoices — receivable and revenue, in accrual mode only
Transactions — every operation, according to its type
Order commissions — commission earned, accrued
Bills — supplier purchases and what is owed
Payroll — salaries, net pay owed, and amounts withheld
Inventory — stock movements and cost of goods sold, on weighted-average cost

That list is the answer to “why is this figure here”. Every number on every report traces to one of those six.

Reading the journal report

A journal entry report shows the entries themselves: date, reference, source, description, and the debit and credit lines.

It also shows total debits and total credits, and those should be equal. That is not decoration — it is the arithmetic check that the derivation held together.

Use this report when a figure elsewhere looks wrong. The summary reports tell you what the number is; the journal tells you which events produced it, with references you can open.

The habit

When an accountant queries a figure, do not defend the total. Run the journal for that period and read the entries. Either the events are wrong — a mistyped payment, a missing bill — or they are right and the explanation is in front of you.

Try it