The ledger and the chart of accounts - Pacten Guides
Every figure anywhere in Finance ultimately comes from the ledger. Understanding it is the difference between trusting a report and hoping it is right.
Under Finance → Ledger & journal, and Finance → Chart of accounts.
The chart of accounts is the list of accounts your business keeps its books in, each with a code, a type and a detail type. The five types are the standard ones: assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses.
It is browse-first: you can search it, filter it and see each account’s balance. Accounts you no longer use are archived rather than deleted, so historic entries still point at something.
Almost every entry is written automatically by the thing that caused it — an invoice, a bank deposit, an approved cash request, a stock movement. Each entry shows its source, so you can always trace a figure back to the document that produced it.
You can also post an entry by hand. That exists for the things no document produces: accruals, depreciation, opening balances, and the correction your accountant asks for.
A posted entry cannot be deleted or edited. A wrong entry is corrected by posting a reversal, which leaves both the original and the correction visible and marked as such. The books show what happened AND what was fixed, which is what makes them auditable.
If a document exists but never reached the ledger, the trial balance will still balance perfectly — because the missing entry is missing from both sides. That is why the ledger screen carries a banner listing documents that have not posted.
A period can be locked once it is closed, after which nothing new can be posted into it. This is what stops a late entry silently changing a month you have already reported on.