Who can use this feature

Roles: Owner, Admin, Staff and optional on custom roles

Plans: Available on Plus, Advanced and Scale

You can easily connect Syft to the cloud accounting and ecommerce 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, you 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
Create accounts for your entity by navigating to "Layouts" > "Accounts" and clicking on "Add account". You'll use these accounts to post your journals to. To create new accounts, you'll need to add account names, account classifications, categories, COA classifications, tax codes and currencies. Syft will always show rounded values unless a report is downloaded to Excel. To journal with decimals you can export the report to Excel and the decimals will show.
Navigate to "Layouts" > "Journals" to post a journal. Once you post the journal, Syft's feature set will unlock for the entity. You will be required to input the following information for the journal:
- Journal name
- Date (within "Select date")
- Account
- Description
- Debit amount
- Credit amount
- Tax amount
- Currency (within "Options")
- Accounting basis (within "Options")

💡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.