Journal entries, demystified
Ninety-five percent of your books post themselves from documents — invoices, bills, payments. Journal entries are for the other five percent, and they follow one rule: debits equal credits.
The cheat sheet
Debits increase assets and expenses. Credits increase liabilities, equity and income. Every entry has both sides in equal total. That is the entire system — everything else is practice.
When you actually need one
Accruals and their reversals, depreciation (if not posted by the assets module), corrections between accounts, owner transactions, year-end adjustments from your accountant. If a document type exists for it — invoice, bill, credit note — use the document instead; documents carry stock and tax consequences journals do not.
Keep them controlled
Direct ledger writes are powerful, which is why they are permission-gated and audited. An entry your accountant can see, question and trace is an entry that belongs in the books.
The manual journal is a last resort
Most journal entries that small businesses type by hand are compensating for a document that should have been entered instead. A manual journal to fix a sale is invisible to the stock file, the customer's account and the tax report — it corrects one symptom and leaves three others.
Correct the document; let the journal follow.
Every journal balances on its own
Debits and credits must match within each entry, not merely in total across the ledger. An entry that balances only in aggregate is a posting bug, and it will surface later as a statement that refuses to agree with itself.
That per-entry check is one of the four things worth confirming before closing any period.
What SeroBooks does with this
Documents post themselves — journals labelled 'auto: sell', 'auto: purchase' — so a trading month produces well over a hundred balanced entries nobody typed. Manual journals exist for genuinely manual cases, are labelled as such, permission-gated, and support reversing entries.
Every entry names its source document and opens it, and superseded lines move to the audit trail rather than disappearing.
See it in your own numbers.
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