Accounting & the ledger
How operations become journal entries — accounts, periods, and the postings behind every flow.
Carbon's flows all end the same way: shipping, receiving, finishing a job, depreciating an asset each post to the general ledger. This page covers the machinery they share.
Accounting is a switch
A company setting, accounting enabled, is off by default. With it off, the physical world still moves — the item ledger records quantities, orders and jobs change status — but no journal entries are written. Every posting below is gated on it.
A shop can run operationally — receiving, building, shipping — before it keeps books. Turn accounting on and those same actions begin posting to the ledger; until then the financial entries are simply skipped.
The journal
Every posting is a journal with balanced journal lines — debits positive, credits negative. The journal carries a source type naming what produced it; each line carries an account and can be tagged with dimensions. A journal is Posted (the normal state), Draft, or Reversed — voiding writes a reversing journal rather than deleting one.
| Source type | Posted by |
|---|---|
| Sales Shipment | Posting a shipment — relieves inventory to COGS. |
| Sales Invoice | Posting a sales invoice — receivable against revenue. |
| Purchase Receipt | Posting a receipt — inventory or WIP against GR/IR. |
| Purchase Invoice | Posting a supplier bill — payables, clearing GR/IR. |
| Job Consumption / Production Event / Job Receipt | A job consuming material, logging time, and finishing into inventory. |
| Job Close | Sweeping a job's residual work-in-process to variance. |
| Asset Depreciation / Asset Disposal | Depreciation runs and asset write-offs. |
Accounts come from one place
Carbon resolves the accounts to post to from a single company-level set of defaults — there are no per-group posting groups. The ones that recur across the flows:
| Account | Used for |
|---|---|
| Inventory | Value of stock on hand. |
| Work in process | Cost accumulating on open jobs. |
| Cost of goods sold | Cost relieved when goods are sold. |
| Accounts receivable / payable | Customer and supplier balances. |
| Goods received, not invoiced | The accrual between receiving goods and being billed for them. |
| Variance | Differences swept at job close or from purchase price. |
Dimensions
A journal line can be tagged with dimensions — location, department, cost center, item posting group, work center, process, fixed-asset class. The same handful of accounts can then be sliced for reporting without multiplying the chart of accounts.
Periods
Every posting lands in an accounting period. A period is a current-period pointer — Active or Inactive — created and activated on demand as you post. There's no hard period-close that blocks posting; the period simply follows the postings.