How to post a journal entry in Skyline Nexus ERP

Posting a manual journal entry

Posting a manual journal entry means recording a direct debit-and-credit entry in Fiscal Authority yourself, rather than letting a sale, purchase, payment, expense or payroll run generate one automatically. It matters because most of the ledger should never need this: the moment you post a manual journal for something a document could have created, you have created an entry the system cannot trace back to a source and cannot regenerate if it needs correcting.

This guide covers when a manual journal is the right tool, the New Journal Entry screen field by field, a worked accrual, how approval and posting work, and how to reverse or correct an entry once it is posted. It also flags two things the screen genuinely cannot do today, so you are not left hunting for a button that is not there.

Before you start

You need the access accounting module permission to open Fiscal Authority at all, and post journal entries to move an approved entry to posted; an administrator has both by default. The fiscal period covering your entry's date must already exist and be Open, not Soft Close or Locked, or the posting is refused with No fiscal period found for the selected date or an equivalent period-closed message.

Check the accounts you plan to use before you start typing. An account must have Allow Manual Posting switched on to accept a line here at all; one flagged Requires Cost Center rejects a line with no cost centre chosen, and one flagged Requires Party rejects a line outright, because the New Journal Entry screen has no field to pick a customer or supplier. If the account you need is one of those, you are looking at the wrong tool for this transaction; see the next section.

When to use a manual journal, and when not to

A manual journal is the right tool for period-end judgements that have no document behind them: accruals for costs incurred but not yet billed, prepayments spread over several months, provisions, inter-branch allocations you are not automating, and foreign-exchange revaluations. None of these arise from a sale, a purchase, a payment or a payslip, so nothing else in the system would ever create them for you.

It is the wrong tool for anything a document already covers. A sale, a purchase, a payment, an expense or a payroll run each generates its own journal automatically once auto-posting is switched on, and that journal belongs to its document: you edit the sale or the payment, not the journal, and the posting rebuilds itself. Posting a manual entry to fix what looks like a wrong sales journal only adds a second, disconnected entry on top of the first; our guide on automatic journal entries explains how those postings actually work.

A useful test before you open New Journal Entry: ask whether a customer, a supplier, a product or an employee is involved. If one is, there is almost always a screen for that transaction that will apply the right tax, update the right sub-ledger and keep the audit trail pointing at a real document. Reach for a manual journal only once you have ruled that out.

Creating a new journal entry

Open Fiscal Authority, Journal Entries, New Journal Entry. The Journal Date defaults to today and shows the fiscal period it falls in underneath; Reference No. is an optional field for your own numbering or a source document reference; Description is a free-text summary of the entry.

Journal Lines needs at least two rows. Each row has Account, Cost Center, a line-level Description, Debit and Credit; entering an amount in one of Debit or Credit locks the other on that row, since a single line cannot be both. Add rows with Add Line and remove one with the row's remove button, as long as at least two remain. A Notes field at the bottom takes anything that does not belong on a specific line, such as the reason for the whole entry.

Total debits must equal total credits before you can save; the screen shows running totals and a Difference row the moment they disagree. Save as Draft keeps the entry editable and out of the ledger; Save and Submit sends it into the approval flow described further down.

Write your Description and each line description as if a stranger will read them in a year, because that is exactly what happens whenever someone reconciles the account later or an auditor samples the entry. A line description of Accrual, dash, is far less useful than one naming the supplier, the period and the reason no invoice had arrived yet.

Worked example: accruing an unbilled service in Canadian dollars

A consultancy in Ontario receives a marketing service in March but the supplier's invoice has not arrived by the time the books close for the month. The controller posts a manual accrual dated 31 March: Journal Date 31 March, Reference No. left blank, Description Accrual: March marketing services, no invoice received.

Line one debits Marketing Expense 4,500.00 with the description Estimated cost, marketing agency; line two credits Accrued Liabilities 4,500.00 with the description Awaiting supplier invoice. Total debits of 4,500.00 equal total credits of 4,500.00, so the entry saves cleanly. When the actual invoice arrives in April for 4,650.00, the controller reverses this accrual in April and books the real supplier invoice through the purchase screen instead of adjusting the manual entry, keeping the small estimate-to-actual difference visible rather than buried in a correction.

• Dr Marketing Expense 4,500.00 / Cr Accrued Liabilities 4,500.00
• Check: 4,500.00 debits = 4,500.00 credits

Submitting, approving and posting

Whether Save and Submit sends your entry for approval depends on two settings under Fiscal Authority, Settings, General Settings, Approval Settings: Require Approval for Journals, and an Approval Threshold in your base currency. Below the threshold, an entry is approved automatically; at or above it, the entry waits. At or above exactly twice the threshold, a second, higher-level approval is also required, a rule fixed in the system rather than a separate setting you configure.

Approvers work from Journal Entries, pending-approvals, headed Pending Actions. Awaiting Approval lists entries with Approve and Reject buttons; Reject opens a box asking for a Rejection Reason. Approved – Awaiting Posting lists entries that cleared approval but still need a Post action, unless Auto-post on Approval is switched on, in which case an approved entry posts immediately. A screen with nothing pending still shows any Draft entries waiting for someone to submit them.

Reversing and correcting a posted entry

Once an entry is posted you cannot edit its lines directly; the two supported changes are on the entry's Show screen. Reverse Journal Entry asks for a reason, then creates a mirror-image entry that cancels the original and marks it reversed; from the current screen this reversal is always dated the day you click the button, not a date you choose, so if you need the reversal in a specific earlier period, check that period is still open before you act. Correct Journal Entry reverses the original the same way and opens a new entry pre-filled with its lines, ready for you to adjust and save.

Continuing the accrual example, the controller reverses the 31 March entry on 2 April: Dr Accrued Liabilities 4,500.00 / Cr Marketing Expense 4,500.00, exactly cancelling the original. The real supplier invoice for 4,650.00 is then recorded through the purchase screen as an ordinary purchase, not as a further manual journal, so it carries its own document trail and posts through the normal account mapping.

Two things this screen cannot do yet

Two features you might expect are not on the New or Edit Journal Entry screen today. There is no way to attach a supporting document, such as a scanned invoice or an approval e-mail, to a manual entry from either screen; keep the file in your own records and reference it in the entry's Description or Reference No. instead. There is also no screen for setting up a recurring journal template, so a monthly accrual you expect to repeat has to be posted by hand each period, or copied using Correct Journal Entry on last month's version as a starting point.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

A short list covers most problems reported on manual journals.

• Totals do not match: the screen highlights the Difference; check for a transposed figure or an amount typed into both Debit and Credit on the same line
• An account rejects the line with a Requires Party message: that account needs a customer or supplier, which this screen cannot supply; post the transaction through the sale, purchase or payment screen instead
• An account rejects the line as not allowing manual posting: it is meant to be updated only by its source document, such as accounts receivable or inventory; find the correct control or clearing account instead
• The entry is refused with no fiscal period found: the period for that date either does not exist yet or is Soft Close or Locked; create the period or choose a date in an open one
• A draft sits unapproved for weeks: check Journal Entries, pending-approvals for entries above the Approval Threshold waiting on an approver, not stuck in the system

Checking your manual entries

Fiscal Authority, Reports, General Ledger lets you see every line a manual entry posted against a specific account, alongside the automatic postings around it, which is the fastest way to confirm an accrual landed where you meant it to. Trial Balance, run for the same date, should still show a zero Difference after a correctly balanced manual entry.

For a wider check, Audit Trail records who created, submitted, approved, posted, reversed or corrected every journal entry and when, which is what an internal reviewer or an external auditor will ask to see first when they test how manual postings are controlled.

A short habit pays for itself here: review every manual journal above your Approval Threshold once a quarter, even the ones nobody flagged as a problem. Because a manual entry has no source document forcing consistency, patterns such as the same two accounts used repeatedly, or entries clustering just under the threshold, are worth noticing early rather than only at year-end or during an audit.