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 . 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 is a 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. |
| Inventory Adjustment | Manual adjustments and inventory count variances: stock gains and losses against the inventory adjustment account. |
| 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 , created and activated on demand as you post. Each period also carries a close status — Open, Closed, or Locked — and operational documents (receipts, shipments, invoices, payments) can't post into a Closed or Locked period. Reopen or unlock the period first, or move the posting date into an open one.