Journals | Online Accounting

Occasionally you will need to make adjustments to your accounts using transactions where no money changes hands. A good example is depreciation – when you buy a car it usually falls in value over time, or depreciates. No money changes hands, but you still need to enter this change in value. To do this, you create what’s known as a Journal Entry.

Another example is when you have made a mistake when entering data in a previous tax reporting period and you need to make an adjustment to your accounts to fix the problem (in most cases you shouldn’t go back and change a transaction for a previous reporting period after you have reported to the Australian Taxation Office. Speak to your accountant for more information).Journal entries can be quite confusing and complicated. You should only enter journal entries if you understand how debits and credits work.

Enter a Journal

Enter the date that you want the transaction to be effective on. For example: ’20/06/07′.
Enter a brief summary of the transaction. For example, ‘Personal Computer Depreciation 2006-2007’.
If the journal is related to a Contact choose one from the drop down.
For each line item select the appropriate Account or Bank Account, select the required tax code or leave it set to — No Tax Code — and enter the debit or credit amount. Note that you can quickly add new Accounts by clicking the add icon next to the Account/Bank Account list. You can only enter one amount for debit or credit per line item. The total of the Debit column must equal the total of the Credit column. A warning will be displayed if you attempt to save a Journal entry with unbalanced columns.
Enter any notes related to the transaction. You may want to include a more detailed explanation about why the entry has been added, for example.
Select a Tag in which to store the Journal. You may leave this set to — Unfiled —.
You may choose to click the Requires follow-up check box which will display an icon next to this transaction in reports. This is useful to remind yourself about something you need to do to this transaction, or just to flag it for attention by your accountant etc.
Click the appropriate save button to store your changes.

Adding and Removing Line Items:

To add a new line item click the add icon next to the appropriate line in the Journal screen. The new line item will be inserted below the item that corresponds to the add icon you just clicked.
To remove a line item click the minus icon next to the line you wish to remove.

Journal Entries Tax Codes

When you select a tax code for a line item in the Journal entry screen, tax line items are automatically calculated in the same way as other transactions. That is, hidden line items are added containing with the correct tax amount allocated to the inbuilt tax Accounts. You don’t need to add additional tax line items on this screen unless you have special requirements such as adjustments to the allocation of money to the inbuilt tax Accounts (i.e. Asset: Tax Paid on Purchases and Liability: Tax Received from Sales).

Journal Entries List

This screen shows a list of all of the general entries you have entered into your file.

List options

At the top of the screen there are some options that can help you to limit which Journal entries appear in the list.

Account – You can use this option to show only those transactions that have been entered using a specific Bank Account or Account. For example, to show only transactions made with the bank account labelled Liability: Credit Card then choose it from the list and click the Show button.

Date Range – The date range option allows you to limit the transactions listed to those that fall within the dates specified. For example, if you wanted to see only transactions that were dated between July 1 2008 and July 31 2008 you would enter ’01/07/08′ into the first date field, and ’31/07/08′ into the second field, and then press the Show button.

If you find that the transaction you are looking for is not in the list, or you get more transactions than you were expecting, be sure that the dates are correct.

Try and keep the date range fairly small to reduce the time it takes to load this screen.

Tag – You can use this option to show only those transactions that have been stored in a specific Report Tag. e.g. to show only transactions made with the Tag called Consulting choose it from the list and click the Show button.

Reversing journals

Currently the best way to handle this is to duplicate the original journal and then just change the direction of the money flow. The transaction date will default to the day you create the duplicate so edit this if required.

Import journals

To import Journals you would need to use our API to capture them in Saasu.

Export journals

To export Journals you can use the API to export as XML -or- you can export Journals to CSV by following these steps:

Go to View and then click Journals.
From the Jorunals list screen set the filters including the date range to view data to be exported.
From your Web browser menu select Edit > Select All. Then select Edit > Copy.
Open a new Spreadsheet file in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers.
Select cell A1 in this new spreadsheet and then from the spreadsheet menu select Paste As Values or Paste Special as Values/Text.
Select and widen column A1. Then this is much more readable.

You might need to rearrange this spreadsheet to match the import format for the system you are moving to.


ADD	Add a Journal icon at the top of the list.
	Edit an existing Journal entry in the list.
	Add Another Journal transaction like this one.
DELETE	Delete an existing Journal entry in the list. You can select multiple transactions to delete by ticking multiple check boxes before clicking the Delete Icon.