How the ledger works

One ledger, not a transaction list

Rent receipts, late fees, CAM billing, supplier invoices, commissions, depreciation and foreign-exchange movements all post into the same double-entry ledger. There is no separate place where some kinds of money live.

That is why the trial balance is the business rather than a monthly reconstruction of it. If a figure appears in a report, there is a journal entry behind it that you can open.

The chart of accounts

Each organisation is seeded with a system chart of accounts covering assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses. You will meet these codes constantly once you start reading entries.

• 1000 Bank, 1001 Bank — foreign currency, 1010 Mobile Money, 1100 Rent receivable
• 1400 Goods received not invoiced, 1500 VAT recoverable
• 2000 Security deposits held, 2100 Owner payable, 2200 Trade payables
• 2500 Withholding tax payable, 2600 VAT payable, 2610 Levies payable
• 4000 Rental income, 4200 Management fee income, 4400 Service charge income, 4600 Late fee income
• 5000 Repairs and maintenance, 5200 Management fee expense, 5700 Purchases, 5800 Depreciation

Dimensions carried on every line

A journal line can carry the property, tenant, vendor and owner it relates to, and an entry can carry a department, cost centre or project. This is what makes property-level profitability real rather than an allocation done afterwards.

When maintenance work completes, the cost posts against the property the work was done on. When rent arrives, the receipt posts against the tenancy and the property. Nothing is attributed by guesswork later.

A batch posts only if it balances

The posting routine sums the debits and the credits before it writes anything. If they differ, or if the total is zero, no entry is created and the caller is told the posting failed.

This is a constraint on the path into the ledger, not a warning message you can dismiss. An unbalanced batch has nowhere to go.

What you can read

The accounting area shows recent transactions, a trial balance, and a set of books per property. Manual entries can be recorded there too, and they go through the same balance check as everything else.