Accounting and the ledger

The accounting module keeps a full double-entry ledger for the company. Once it is started, policies, payments, commissions, claims and reinsurance post their own journal entries, so the books follow the business without anyone typing them in.

Starting the books

Accounting > Overview > Start the books asks for the month to keep the books from. It creates:

• a chart of accounts of about sixty accounts (bank, premium receivable, unearned premium, outstanding claims, commission, taxes and so on), each with a fixed role the automatic entries rely on;
• a bank account for each way of paying (transfer, cheque, card, cash), linked to its ledger account;
• the first month.

Nothing before that month is posted. If you move from another system, enter what you owed and owned on that day with Accounting > Journal > Opening balances; any difference goes to the Opening balances account.

The chart of accounts

Accounting > Chart of accounts lists every account with its type (asset, liability, equity, income, expense) and Balance today. Ledger on a row shows each movement with a running balance. You can add your own accounts (for example a second rent account) and put them Under another for the reports. The accounts the system posts to are marked and cannot be deleted. Code in your other accounting system is used by the exports.

What posts by itself

When this happens	The ledger records
An invoice or debit note is issued	Premium receivable against gross written premium, policy fees and each tax
A credit note is issued, or an invoice written off	The reverse, or the bad debt
A customer pays	The bank (or cash, or cards in transit) against premium receivable, with any exchange difference
A commission is earned, changed, or paid	Commission expense against commission payable, then the bank
A claim is paid	Claims paid against the bank; a provider invoice already booked is moved across
Premium is ceded, a claim recovered, a statement settled	Reinsurance premium, commission and recoveries against the reinsurer's account
A supplier bill is approved	The expense (and VAT recoverable) against bills payable

Each entry is posted once per event: saving a record again does not post it twice. An entry dated in a closed month moves to the first open month.

Cost centres and lines of business

Accounting > Cost centres groups figures by branch, by line of business or both. Every automatic line carries the policy's branch and line, and a policy can be given its own cost centre with Who pays on its page. The financial statements filter on both.

Manual journals

Accounting > Journal > Write a journal takes a date, a description and lines (each a debit or a credit). It is saved as a draft; Post puts it in the ledger. By default the person who wrote it cannot post it (see Separation of duties in the compliance guide), and an approval chain can be set on Post a manual journal. Reverse books the opposite entry on a date you choose. A journal can be set to Reverse on a date, which is useful for accruals.

Currencies

Quotes and policies can be written in another currency. Invoices remember the rate of the day; when the customer pays, any difference goes to exchange gains or losses. Rates are kept in Accounting > Exchange rates: the rate is how much of your company's currency one unit buys. At month end, Revalue currencies on the month restates open foreign invoices and foreign bank accounts at the month-end rate and reverses it the next day.

Financial statements

Accounting > Financial statements shows the income statement, the balance sheet and the trial balance for any dates, a cost centre or a line of business, and downloads to Excel. The balance sheet includes the result of the year so far.

Sending figures to another accounting system

Accounting > Journal > Export produces the entries for a period in a generic layout or ready to import into Xero, QuickBooks Online or Sage. Accounting > Overview > Accounting API key gives a key for the read-only API (/api/accounting/v1/accounts, /journals and /trial-balance) so another system can fetch the figures itself.