U
Ustawi
Chart of Accounts · 4 min read

Recording a manual journal entry

Most of the ledger fills itself from app events, but occasionally you need to post an entry by hand — an accrual, a correction, an opening balance. A manual journal entry lets you do that within the same double-entry discipline, and every one is audit-logged so a hand-made entry is never an untraceable one.

When a manual entry is appropriate

  • Adjustments and accruals that no automatic app event produces.
  • Corrections that cannot be made by re-running the originating event.
  • Opening balances or one-off reclassifications between accounts.

If a routine loan or insurance event should have posted the figure, prefer fixing that event over a manual entry — a manual journal is for what the event mappings genuinely do not cover, not a shortcut around them.

Posting the entry

  1. 1
    Enter balanced lines
    Add the debit and credit lines against the right accounts. Total debits must equal total credits — the entry will not post as an unbalanced journal.
  2. 2
    Describe and date it
    Give the entry a clear narration and the correct posting date, so its purpose is legible later and it lands in the right period.
  3. 3
    Post into the open period
    It posts into the current open period. If it belongs in a closed period, that period must first be reopened through the controlled process.
Everything is logged

Each manual journal entry is captured in the audit log with who posted it and when, so it stands up to review exactly like a system posting does. The audit trail is what makes manual entries safe to allow at all.

Related

Mapping an app event to a GL account →How period close and reopen works →Reading the audit log →
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