Money
Invoicing and the ledger
What the money half records, where its edges are, and the one thing it is built to remove: the monthly afternoon spent checking bank statements against invoices.
Ergira records what you invoiced, what you were invoiced, what was paid, which bank movement each of those was — and, if you want it, what all of that adds up to. The double-entry ledger is real: a chart of accounts, journals that cannot be edited, and a trial balance per entity per month. It is off until you set one up, because plenty of organisations want the documents and not the books.
The thing this is for
Every month somebody sits down with the bank statements and checks them against the invoices issued and received, because the accountant needs that reconciliation and because a missing purchase invoice is taxed rather than deducted. That afternoon is the problem. Statement import, matching, and bills that file themselves from email are the three halves of removing it — and the bit that actually removes it is the last one, because the fix for a payment with no document is the document arriving, not a cleverer matcher.
One table, two directions
A sales invoice and a purchase invoice are the same shape: a counterparty, a date, some lines, some tax, a total and a balance. They are one model with a direction, which is why the balance arithmetic, the tax summary, the payment allocation and the ageing are written once and cannot disagree between the two.
- Sale
- What you issued. It carries your numbering, your tax treatment, and a PDF you send.
- Purchase
- What you were sent. It carries their number, and the document you hold — see bills.
- Credit note
- A reversal of a sale or a purchase, on its own numbering sequence. See issuing.
Three states, and only three
| State | What it means | What can be done |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Not yet a document. It has no number and nobody has seen it. | Edit anything, delete it, issue it. |
| Issued | A legal document with a number. Somebody has it. | Record payments, credit it, download the PDF. Nothing on it can be edited. |
| Void | Issued and then cancelled. The number stays taken. | Nothing. It is kept so the numbering has no hole. |
An issued document is never editable, and the screen says so by having no editor
A draft opens an editor; an issued document opens a record. There is no disabled form — a form somebody can type into and not save teaches them the product is broken, while an absent one teaches them the rule. Correcting an issued invoice is a credit note and a new invoice, which is also what your accountant expects to see.
The rest of the module
The pages below are the whole of it. Nothing here is required — an organisation that only wants to raise invoices and stop can ignore every one of them.
| If you want to | See |
|---|---|
| Raise and issue documents, and correct them | Raising and issuing |
| Charge tax | Tax rates |
| Record what suppliers sent you | Bills |
| Turn recorded hours into lines | Pricing recorded time |
| Email an invoice, chase it, or repeat it monthly | Sending, chasing and repeating |
| Let a client pay by card | Getting paid online |
| Reconcile what the gateway actually paid you | Settlements and saved cards |
| Match a bank statement | Bank accounts and reconciliation |
| Pay a batch of suppliers | Paying suppliers |
| Keep books | Double entry |
| Write something down over its life | Fixed assets and depreciation |
| See a profit and loss, or close a year | Statements and the year end |
| Add several entities up, or compare against a plan | The group, and what you planned |
| Send it all to your accountant’s own package | Your accountant’s own books |
| Hand the accountant one month | Month end |
Money, quantities and rates
Amounts are stored as whole minor units — cents, tetri, fils — and never as a decimal. Quantities are stored in thousandths so a third of an hour is exact, and tax rates in basis points so 7.5% is a whole number. Nothing in the money path is ever a floating-point value, because a rounding error in a total is found by a customer.
Rounding is half-away-from-zero rather than the language's default half-up. On a credit note every line is negative, and half-up rounds −2.5 to −2 while rounding 2.5 to 3 — so a credit note would fail to exactly reverse the invoice it credits, by a cent, on any line ending in half.
Currency
Every document carries its own currency and is never silently converted. Where a document is not in the issuing entity's currency it also carries the rate used, so the entity-currency figure is reproducible years later rather than being recomputed against today's rate.
How many decimal places a currency has is a property of the currency, not a constant. Yen has none, Kuwaiti dinar has three, and a product that assumes two either invents a fraction of a yen or divides a dinar by a hundred.
A payment stores the rate at the moment of settlement, which is not the rate at issue. The difference between the two is the gain or loss you realised, and it is shown against the payment that realised it. Where either end has no rate it is reported as not measured rather than as nil — an unmeasured difference is not a zero one.
Who can see and do what
Finance sits on the ordinary organisation role, not a separate ladder — the same decision the service desk and the CRM made. A third ladder would mean every organisation configuring three.
| Permission | Who has it | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| View | Manager and above | Reading documents, payments, the bank screen and the month-end pack. |
| Edit | Manager and above | Drafting, issuing, recording payments, reconciling. |
| Configure | Owner and admin only | Tax rates, numbering, the bill address, billing rates, the chart of accounts, closing a period, gateways and the accountant connection. |
Configure is deliberately narrower
Between them, tax rates and numbering decide what the organisation charges and what number appears on a legal document. Whoever raises invoices does not need to change either on a Tuesday.
Where the edges are
- The return is still yours
- Statements and the month-end pack assemble the evidence and compute no liability. Filing is your accountant’s, and the pack exists to make that afternoon short rather than to replace them.
- A rate, not a contract
- Hours are priced through scoped, dated rates. What a contract says an hour is worth — a retainer, block hours, an included allowance, a cap, a minimum increment, a fixed-fee phase — is not here, because a product that guesses at any of them produces an invoice somebody has to apologise for.
- No currency conversion
- Documents are held in the currency they were raised in, and figures are reported per currency rather than added together. The one exception is consolidation, which translates from rates you supply yourself — never from a market feed.
- Payroll is not here
- Ergira's HR half is the system of record for what somebody is entitled to. What was paid and reported is payroll's, and this module does not cross that line either.