Most entries in your books are made for you: issuing an invoice, approving a bill, finalising a payslip. Journals are for the adjustments nothing else can make — depreciation, an accrual, a marketplace settlement, a reclassification.
Find them under Accounting → Journal entries.
Entries you write
+ New entry opens a form with a date, a description and the lines. Each line takes an account, a debit or a credit, an optional note and an optional division.
Two rules the app enforces:
- It must balance. Debits equal credits, or it will not post.
- A posted entry is never edited. It gets reversed. If you need to change something that has already posted, reverse it and post the correction — both stay visible, which is what an auditor expects to see.
You can save as a draft first. A draft touches nothing; only posting reaches the ledger.
Reclassifying something already posted
A common case: a cost landed on the wrong division, and the entry is posted so you cannot edit it. Post a journal that moves it, debiting and crediting the same account with different divisions:
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DR 5310 Hosting & infrastructure R105,00 ICT Warehouse
CR 5310 Hosting & infrastructure R105,00 (no division)
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The account total does not move; only the analysis changes. The original entry and the correction both remain on record.
Journals that write themselves
The Automatic tab holds entries that post on a schedule, without anyone remembering.
Accruals and prepayments
An accrual books a cost you have incurred but not been invoiced for, and reverses itself when the invoice arrives. Give it a date to post and a date to reverse.
An amortisation takes something you paid up front — annual insurance, a yearly licence — and charges a slice each month. Give it a total and a number of months.
Before you save, the form states exactly what it will post, including the rounding: R1 000 over seven months is six postings of R142,85 and a last one of R142,90, so the total comes to R1 000,00 and not R999,95.
Once a schedule has posted anything, you can stop it but not delete it. The entries it made are real ledger history and are reversed on their own terms, never swept away with the plan that created them.
Interest on a balance
A fixed monthly amount is wrong for interest, because the balance moves. A director's loan grows every time the business is funded — one real loan took five advances in nine days — and a stored amount would drift away from it with nothing to say so.
So interest is set up differently: you give it the account to charge interest on, the rate, and where the charge and the credit go. The charge is then computed from the daily closing balance when the month is posted.
Three things it gets right that are easy to get wrong by hand:
- Corrections are not charged twice. Reversing an entry leaves the original in the ledger with a mirror beside it; both are counted, so a corrected advance is charged once.
- A month where nothing was owed costs nothing. A loan account can swing the other way — the director draws more than he put in — and on those days the business owes nothing and is charged nothing.
- Each month is charged exactly once, however often the job runs or catches up.
Use Preview to see a month before it posts: the average balance it will charge on, the amount, and the exact double entry. On a balance that moved several times you cannot check this by hand.
A rate change applies to months not yet charged. Months already in the ledger keep the rate they were charged at — they are posted, and possibly on a tax return.
Where the interest should go
You can credit the interest back to the same loan account, so it compounds, or to a separate accrued-interest account.
Keeping it separate is usually better on a loan you are still adding to: the loan account then always answers "what have I actually lent this business?" without stripping interest out of it, and waiving or paying the interest later is one clean transaction. Compounding is simple, and worth very little at small balances.
Interest and tax, in South Africa
Interest you charge your own company accrues to you when it is earned, not when it is paid, so you declare it whether or not any cash moved.
Each individual has an annual exemption for local interest under section 10(1)(i) — R23 800 if you are under 65, R34 500 if you are 65 or older. Below that, the interest is tax free in your hands while remaining deductible to the company, which makes a shareholder loan one of the more efficient ways to take value out of a small business.
Two practical points. Put the loan terms in writing — rate, security, when it is repayable — or SARS can question the deduction. And charge a defensible rate: the risk is not that you charge too little but that an inflated rate is challenged as not arm's length.