How Sales Scribe records your transactions
Sales Scribe keeps a full set of double-entry books for you in the background. You never have to write a journal entry by hand — when you issue an invoice, record a payment, or void a document, Sales Scribe makes the correct accounting entries automatically. This guide explains, in plain English, what those entries are and when they happen, so the figures in your reports always make sense.
If any accounting term here is unfamiliar, the Glossary explains it.
The one rule behind everything: debits equal credits
Every time something financial happens, Sales Scribe records it as a balanced entry — the total debits always equal the total credits. This is what keeps your books correct. You do not need to think in debits and credits day to day; you just issue invoices and record payments, and Sales Scribe translates each action into the right balanced entry.
Which actions affect your accounts, and which don't
This distinction matters, because only some documents change your financial position.
These actions record entries in your accounts (your general ledger):
- Issuing a sales invoice
- Issuing a sales credit note
- Posting a purchase invoice
- Issuing a purchase (supplier) credit note
- Recording (posting) and allocating a payment — customer or supplier
- Voiding any of the above
- Writing off an invoice
These actions do not touch your accounts — they are operational documents only:
- Quotes, estimates and proforma invoices
- Purchase orders
- Delivery notes
- Goods received notes
- Recorded customer purchase orders
- Applying a credit note to an invoice (the accounting already happened when the credit note was issued — applying it only settles the balance)
- Any draft of anything
Why this matters: a quote or a draft invoice can sit in your system without ever affecting your revenue, your VAT, or your customer balances. Nothing is recorded in your books until you issue or post the document.
What each action records
Amounts below are shown as Dr (debit) and Cr (credit). Everything is recorded in the document's currency, with a matching value in your organisation's functional currency for your reports.
Issue a sales invoice
When you issue an invoice:
- Dr Accounts Receivable — the full amount the customer now owes you (including VAT).
- Cr Sales / Revenue — the net value of what you sold (before VAT), split across the income accounts of the items sold. If you gave an invoice-level discount, it is spread proportionally across those income accounts.
- Cr Output VAT — the VAT you charged, which you owe to the tax authority.
If any line is a stock item (a product set to Track inventory and For resale with a cost price), Sales Scribe also records the cost of the sale at the same time:
- Dr Cost of Goods Sold — the cost of the items sold.
- Cr Inventory Asset — reducing the value of stock you are holding.
This means your profit is measured correctly: the sale and the cost of that sale are recorded together.
Issue a sales credit note
A credit note reverses part of a sale:
- Dr Sales / Revenue and Dr Output VAT — undoing the income and VAT.
- Cr Accounts Receivable — reducing what the customer owes.
Record and allocate a customer payment
Sales Scribe records payments in two steps (see How payments work):
- When you record (post) the payment: Dr Bank (the money you received) / Cr Unapplied Receipts (a holding account).
- When you allocate it to an invoice: Dr Unapplied Receipts / Cr Accounts Receivable — settling the customer's debt, dated on the settlement date (the later of the payment date and the invoice date), not the day you clicked. If the invoice was in a foreign currency and the exchange rate has moved, a realised exchange gain or loss is recorded here too — on the settlement date, which is when accounting standards recognise it.
Post a purchase invoice
A supplier's bill:
- Dr Expense or Inventory/Asset — the cost of what you bought.
- Dr Input VAT — the VAT you were charged, which (if you are VAT-registered) you can normally reclaim.
- Cr Accounts Payable — what you now owe the supplier.
Issue a purchase (supplier) credit note
- Dr Accounts Payable — reducing what you owe.
- Cr Expense / Inventory and Cr Input VAT — undoing the cost and VAT.
Void a document
Voiding an issued or posted document records an equal and opposite entry, fully reversing its effect — while keeping a permanent record of both the original and the reversal. Nothing is ever silently deleted from your books.
Write off an invoice
Writing off an unpaid invoice as a bad debt records Dr Bad Debt Expense / Cr Accounts Receivable for the outstanding amount. Sales Scribe finds the bad-debt account by its role in your chart of accounts, not by its name, so you may call it what you like; if your chart has no account in that role, the write-off asks you to add one first.
Online payment refunds and disputes
A refund or a dispute arrives from your card processor as an instant — a moment in time, not a date. Sales Scribe posts it on the calendar day that moment falls on in your organisation's time zone (see Edit your organisation details). A refund processed at 23:30 UTC on 30 September is 00:30 on 1 October for a UK business in summer time, and is posted in October.
Before any of this can happen: your accounts must be set up
Sales Scribe needs to know which of your ledger accounts to use for each role — which account is your receivables control, which is your Output VAT account, and so on. You set this once in Settings → Accounting. If a required account is missing, Sales Scribe will not let you issue the document and will tell you which account to configure.
What happens next
Once recorded, these entries flow straight into your reports — the Profit and Loss, the VAT Summary, the aged receivables and payables, and each customer's statement and account balance.