When you need a journal entry
Most of your bookkeeping should come from invoices, bills, payments and payroll — they write their own ledger entries, and they keep the paperwork attached. Post a manual journal when there is no document behind the movement:
- Depreciation for the month
- Correcting a posting that went to the wrong account
- Accruals and prepayments at period end
- Introducing opening balances
- Moving money between your own accounts where no payment record exists
Posting one
Go to Accounting → Journal → New entry.
Give the entry a date, a memo saying why it exists, and optionally a reference number. Then add at least two lines. Each line names an account and an amount, on either the debit or the credit side.
The entry must balance: total debits must equal total credits. The system refuses to save an entry that does not, because an unbalanced entry would break every report that reads the ledger.
A few rules the form enforces, all for the same reason:
- No negative amounts. In double-entry, direction is expressed by which side the amount is on, not
by its sign. If you want to reduce something, put the amount on the other side.
- A line is a debit or a credit, never both.
- Every line needs an amount. Blank lines are not saved.
Which side is which
If you are not used to debits and credits, this is the whole rule:
| Debit | Credit | |
|---|---|---|
| Asset (bank, stock, owed to you) | increases | decreases |
| Liability (owed by you) | decreases | increases |
| Equity | decreases | increases |
| Income | decreases | increases |
| Expense / COGS | increases | decreases |
So recording PKR 50,000 of cash sales is: debit Bank 50,000, credit Sales income 50,000. Paying PKR 20,000 rent is: debit Rent expense 20,000, credit Bank 20,000.
Approval — why your entry says "Pending"
A manual journal does not hit the ledger the moment you save it. It is created Pending approval and only affects your reports once it is approved. This is deliberate: manual journals are the one place someone can move money between any two accounts with no document behind it, so they get a second pair of eyes.
If your organisation has another approver — anyone with the Org Admin or Approver role — then the person who created an entry cannot approve it themselves. They will be notified that it is waiting, and they approve it from Accounting → Journal.
If you are the only person who can approve — a sole trader, or a business with one bookkeeper — you can approve your own entry, because otherwise it could never be posted at all. The entry is marked [self-approved: sole approver] so that anyone auditing the books later can see that one person both created and approved it, rather than it appearing as though a second person signed off.
As soon as you add a second Org Admin or Approver, the normal rule takes over again.
Rejecting
An approver who does not agree with an entry can reject it with a reason. The entry is not deleted; it stays visible with the rejection recorded, so the conversation is on the record.
Reversing a posted entry
Posted entries are never edited or deleted. If one is wrong, reverse it: the system creates a mirror-image entry that cancels it exactly, and both remain visible. Your ledger then tells the truth about what happened — that an entry was made and later undone — rather than quietly pretending the mistake never occurred. That is what makes the books auditable.
The reversal is itself a journal entry, so it goes through the same approval step.
Recurring journals
For an entry that repeats unchanged every month — depreciation, a fixed accrual — set up a template under Accounting → Recurring. It will be raised automatically on schedule, and still goes through approval, so nothing posts without someone looking at it.