Accounting is the book of record. Journals are written, posted, approved and — when they are wrong — reversed rather than edited; periods are locked so that last month stops moving; and the reports read straight through to the transactions behind them.
The books: chart of accounts, journals, periods, reconciliation and reporting — 24 distinct permissions.
The chart is held per company, so a group does not have to share one set of account codes. Set it up once, in full, before any posting: renumbering a chart that already has a year of journals against it is not an edit, it is a migration.
Four separate acts with four separate permissions. A posted journal is not edited — it is reversed and re-posted, which leaves both the mistake and the correction visible. That is the difference between a ledger and a spreadsheet.
Locking a period is what makes a reported figure stay reported. Reopening one is a deliberate, permissioned act — and everything filed on the old figure has to be revisited, so treat a reopen as an incident rather than a correction.
Statements are imported rather than keyed, and the finished reconciliation is locked. An unlocked reconciliation drifts the moment somebody back-dates a transaction into the period.
Budgets sit against the accounts they govern. The cash-flow forecast runs to a horizon you set, so it can answer a six-week question and a two-quarter question separately.
Financial and cash-flow overviews consolidate across companies for whoever is allowed to see across them. Consolidation is a permission, not a view setting.
Every report can be exported, printed, shared by link, or opened down to the transactions underneath. Drill down before you circulate: a figure nobody can explain is worse than no figure.
The capability list this guide is written against, unabridged. Nothing above adds to it.
Accounting on the Finance pageThe modules Accounting hands work to, or takes it from. Most problems that look like one module are a handover between two.