How it works

An afternoon to set up, then it stays out of the way.

What follows is the whole system in the order you would meet it — from the first evening of typing your company in, to the morning six months later when somebody asks what a vendor is owed and the answer takes four seconds.

Day one

Four things to fill in, and none of them are the accounts.

Your company

Name, address, NTN and the letterhead that goes on every printed order, voucher and statement. One screen.

Your people

Who signs in, and which of the six roles they get. Roles are yours to edit — the grid is read, write or nothing, per module.

Your projects

The jobs everything else hangs off, with their cost centres. Archive one when it finishes and its documents stay where they are.

Where you are starting

Opening balances, if the company did not begin last week. Enter them once and the ledger picks up from there.

The chart of accounts is already in — a construction one, with retention, withholding tax, materials inventory and work in progress where you would expect them. Change what you disagree with.

The chain

Four documents, each one filling in the next.

Every one of them carries two approvals, and the fourth is the one that writes to the ledger.

Requisition

What the site wants

Lines, quantity, the project, the cost centre and a justification. The person asking does not need to know a vendor or a price.

Order

Who is supplying it

Choose an approved requisition; the lines come across. Add the vendor, the rates, tax, freight and the terms.

Goods receipt

What arrived

The store confirms quantities against the order — in full or in part — and notes the delivery challan. Stock moves here.

Payment

What was actually paid

Gross, withholding tax, retention, any other deduction, the bank and the instrument. The voucher prints, and the journal posts.

Sales side

The money coming in

Customers, sales invoices and receipts run the same way, against the same ledger, with the same two approvals.

Anything else

A journal voucher

For the entries that belong to no document. It still refuses to post unless the two sides agree.

Stores and stock

What is on site, what it is worth, and who took it.

Materials, warehouses and bins, with a moving-average value that updates on every receipt. Issues to site, transfers between stores and adjustments all leave a ledger entry behind them, so the inventory figure in the balance sheet is the same number the store keeper is looking at.

Receipts, issues, transfers and adjustments, each approved
Moving average per material — no month-end valuation exercise
Stock on hand by warehouse, by bin, by project
Every movement traceable to the document that caused it

Stock levels by material and warehouse, with quantity and value.

People and payroll

A pay run that ends in the ledger, like everything else.

Employees, departments, positions, absences and personnel actions — then a pay run built from wage types you define. Approve it and the payslips are issued and the journal is written: salaries expense, payable, and whatever is deducted, each to its own account.

Your own earnings and deductions, not a fixed list
Payslips a person can be given without anybody retyping a figure
A pay run that is settled by payment vouchers like any other payable
Absences and actions kept against the employee, not in a drawer

A payslip showing earnings, deductions and net pay for one employee.

Who owes what

Ageing that agrees with the ledger, because it is the ledger.

Payables and receivables by age bracket, a balance per vendor and per customer, and a statement for any of them that you can print and send. None of it is a separate register kept alongside the books — every figure is the sum of postings that a document made.

4 sec from “what do we owe Crescent?” to a statement you can email them

Vendor balances listing each supplier with what is owed.

Asking it things

Eleven reports, and a builder for the twelfth.

Position, payables, ageing, cash out, retention and tax, vendor and customer statements, trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet. When the question is one nobody anticipated, the builder takes a source, the columns you want, a date range and a grouping, and gives you the answer — and lets you save it under a name so the next person just runs it.

Every report exports to CSV, correctly, including the accents
Filter by project, cost centre, vendor or period
Saved reports belong to the workspace, not to whoever built them
Printing is a proper printed document, not a screenshot of a table

A built report grouped by payee with gross, withholding tax, retention and net columns.

Who sees what

A store officer should never see a payment. So he cannot.

Roles are a grid: thirty-four modules down the side, and for each one no access, read, or read and write. Six roles are set up to begin with and every one of them is yours to change — except the administrator, which cannot be stripped, because somebody has to be able to put it right.

Checked where it matters

The permission is enforced in the router, before the page is decided — not by hiding a menu item. A URL somebody was sent, or guessed, gets the same answer.

The money panels too

Someone without financial access sees a dashboard with the figures taken out of it, not a dashboard with the figures greyed. There is nothing to read over a shoulder.

And a record of it all

Every create, edit, approval and rejection goes into the activity log with the person and the time. Six months later it still answers who and when.