Who can use this feature
Roles: Owner, Admin, Staff and optional on custom roles
Plans: Available on Plus and Advanced
You can easily connect Syft to the cloud accounting and e-commerce software that you use for most of your entities. However, you may have entities or accounting data that is infrequent, doesn't require a bank account integration or doesn't warrant the use of a fully-fledged accounting platform.
Adding this entity as a journal entity on Syft is a great way to keep compliant and still have all the analytical power of Syft at your disposal.
What are journals?
Journals are how you record financial transactions. To create a journal, enter details of a transaction. Every journal entry includes certain information such as the date of the transaction, affected accounts, description, and amount. You can also include other information in journals such as customer or supplier details, allocations to divisions, currency types and tax codes.
Syft uses the information from journals to create financial reports. This includes everything from the profit and loss statement, balance sheet, cash flow statements and KPIs through to visualizations, forecasts, and customer and product analytics.
What are journal entities?
Journal entities are entities that start from scratch, i.e. there is no underlying account or transactional data. Journal entities allow you to record financial transactions by posting journals.
💡 Pro tip
Journal entities are a great way to record the transactions and activities of a business if you don't want to link a bank account to that business.
Journal entity examples
Journal entities are ideally suited for entities:
With infrequent transactions: From an accounting perspective, an entity with a few transactions over the course of a year can easily be maintained as a journal entity. Typical examples of this would be property portfolios, asset managers and holding companies.
That don't need bank integrations: Connecting your bank account to your accounting software is a great way to record transactions as they happen. However, you may have transactions that aren't incurred through a bank account or are recorded in a different system altogether (e.g. posting depreciation, cash transactions). A journal entity is a great way to manage the books of these types of businesses, either by posting journals that are individual transactions or grouping transactions into individual journals.
That have basic accounting needs: Not all businesses require the same level of accounting sophistication. Some businesses may simply want to record transactions periodically.
📓 Note
The entire journal will need to balance, i.e. debits must equal credits. Syft will check this before posting the journal and highlight any issues for you to resolve.
How to create a journal entity on Syft
Click "Add Entity" at the top right-hand side of your screen and click on "Journal Entity"
Add the following information for a new journal entity on Syft:
Entity name
Country
Base currency
Financial year end
Accounting basis
Industry (start typing in the find your industry)
You will land on an overview page for creating and managing accounts. To add accounts, click on "Add accounts." You will then need to fill in the account name, it's classification (i.e. P&L or BS), the relevant category, the COA classification, tax code (if appropriate), and the currency. To add an additional account, click "Add additional account."
Click "Create." Note: Once an account is created, it can be renamed and moved in layouts.
To post a journal, navigate to "Layouts" > "Journals." The click on "Add journal."
Type in a name for your new journal and click "Done." You can then populate your journal with the appropriate accounts, descriptions, debit and credit amounts, and tax. You can upload a single journal or multiple, and you have the optional to add additional rows by clicking on "Add row."
Use the "Options" button to select the accounting basis for your journal.
You can click the "Auto balance" button to automatically balance your journals.
You can then click "Save Draft" to save your journal as a draft, or you can click "Post" to post the journal.
💡Pro tip
Once you post a journal to an account, that account will lock to prevent you from deleting the account and any associated journals. You can see which journals have posted to which accounts by clicking on the pen icon to edit the journal.
Additional options
Once you've created your journal, you will see that you have the ability to edit it (with the pencil icon), duplicate it (with the overlapping boxes), reverse it (with the circular arrow), or delete it (with the trash can).
