How banking works

What this does

Accounting → Banking is where the shop's real-world money accounts meet the ledger. Every checking, savings, and credit card account you set up is paired with one general-ledger account, and everything that touches the bank posts as a journal entry against that GL account. The registers, the reconciliation, and the Banking Overview balances all read from those entries. There is no separate "bank balance" the app maintains on the side.

Three ways a transaction gets in

You enter it. Checks, card charges, deposits, transfers, and petty cash each have their own screen (Money Out → Checks, Money Out → Credit Cards, Money In → Deposits, Banking → Transfers, and Petty Cash on the Banking Overview). Each posts a balanced entry the moment you save.

Email brings it. Bank alert emails (a Chase "You sent $X" alert, an Apple Card transaction notice) and forwarded receipts land in the Transaction Inbox as proposed transactions. Nothing posts until someone approves it, or a payee rule you've trusted approves it for you.

A statement is imported. A CSV export from the bank goes through Statement import. Lines already on the books are matched and left alone; the rest go through the same inbox.

Manual entry and email are the primary feeds. The importer is the catch-up and the audit: run it when you've been away from the inbox, or at month end to prove nothing was missed.

The Banking Overview page

Banking → Banking Overview shows three totals (cash on hand across bank accounts, card balances owed, and cash minus card debt), then a table per account type. Each bank account row shows its balance, when it was last reconciled (green within five weeks, yellow to nine, red after), and buttons for its Register and to Reconcile. The action bar at the top links to every entry screen plus Petty Cash, Import Statement, Manage Accounts, and Bank Rules.

Rules the app enforces

Posted transactions are edited in place, not deleted. A wrong amount, payee, category, or date on a posted check or card transaction is corrected from its register with a required reason, and the change is logged. Only an Owner or General Manager can do it. See Editing and voiding posted transactions.

Duplicates are caught on exact keys only. The same email twice, or the same account, amount, date, and time, is a duplicate and is held. "Close enough" on amount and date is not a duplicate and never merges anything on its own. How the inbox handles them is in The Transaction Inbox.

Reconciled lines don't change. Once a line has been cleared in a finished reconciliation, the edit dialog refuses it. Voiding is still allowed, but the reversal lands as a new line that will show up uncleared on your next reconciliation.

A period lock stops everything before the lock date, banking included. See Period locking.

Before you start

Every banking screen needs accounting.manage, which today means the Owner or General Manager role. The Accountant role can see reports and post journal entries but cannot approve inbox items, reconcile, transfer, or import. If your bookkeeper needs to run banking, give them General Manager for now.

Set up the checking account first, then cards. Card payments are posted from the checking side, so the checking account has to exist before a card payment has somewhere to come from.

Common problems

The balance on Banking Overview doesn't match the bank. Reconcile. The difference is either a transaction on the statement that isn't in the register, or one in the register the bank never saw. The reconciliation screen shows you which.

I recorded a card payment from checking, and the card's balance didn't drop. Check the category on the checking-side transaction: it must be the card's own GL account (the 2100-range liability), not an expense. Fix it from the register.

Online card payments from customers. Customer card payments taken through the app are never entered by hand in banking. The processor's payout arrives as a bank credit and is explained through the inbox and Deposit splits.