10. Bookkeeping

Module: Bookkeeping. Included in every plan.

The module is your company's Grundbuch — the book of original entry in the sense of the GoBD: a continuous, gapless record of every business transaction. It does not replace your tax adviser; it hands them clean data and gives you the overview at any time.

How entries arrive

Three routes lead into the journal:

1. From an invoice — Bookkeeping → From invoice. Select one or more of your outgoing invoices. The platform forms the journal entry, groups the line items by VAT rate and assigns the matching accounts.
2. From a receipt — from the scanner. An incoming invoice or a till receipt is posted as an expense; what is posted is exactly what you confirmed in the scanner.
3. By hand — for everything that has no document in the platform.

The journal entry

A journal entry is the double record of a transaction: debit to credit. The platform creates one line for every VAT rate present — a supermarket receipt with 7 % and 19 % produces two lines, because each rate needs its own account.

An outgoing invoice of €1,000 net at 19 %:

Account	Debit	Credit
1400 Receivables	1,190.00
8400 Revenue 19 % VAT		1,000.00
Output VAT 19 %		190.00

The account numbers come from your chart of accounts (SKR03 or SKR04) and follow from the tax category you chose on the invoice.

Draft and finalisation

Status	What is possible
Draft	freely editable and deletable
Finalised	immutable — correctable only by a reversal
Reversed	cancelled by a reversal, still visible
Reversal	the counter-entry itself

Finalise makes an entry permanent. That is not a quirk but § 146 Abs. 4 AO: the original content of an entry must remain ascertainable. Nothing is overwritten after finalisation.

Reversal (Storno) creates a new entry with the same accounts and the amounts negated (Generalumkehr — the DATEV form of a reversal). Both entries stay in the journal and are linked — you can see that a correction happened, when, and what it looked like before. That is precisely what an audit wants to see.

Entries filed from the scanner carry their source document: the button of the same name in the journal opens the archived original.

The payment state stays changeable after finalisation: an invoice may be paid months later, and that is not a change to the journal entry.

Important

Entry numbers are gapless per company and financial year. The number is assigned inside the same transaction as the entry itself, so no gap appears even when several people work at once. A gap in the journal is the first thing a tax audit looks for.

Reports

VAT return (UStVA)

Bookkeeping → UStVA. For a year, optionally for one month:

• taxable turnover, split by VAT rate
• output VAT (what you collected)
• input VAT (what you paid)
• the amount payable — the difference, i.e. what goes to the tax office

Only finalised entries and reversals are counted.

Open items (OPOS)

Bookkeeping → Open items. Every finalised entry that is not fully paid, with days overdue. Separated into

• receivables — what your customers owe you,
• payables — what you owe your suppliers,

and the balance between them. This list is your manual dunning and your cash forecast in one.

DATEV export

Bookkeeping → DATEV export. Produces a posting batch in the EXTF format that your tax adviser imports into DATEV. One row per journal line, with the document date, the document field, the posting text, the account and the contra account.

Tip

If your tax adviser should fetch the batch themselves rather than be sent it: invite them as an Auditor and additionally grant Bookkeeping → list and Bookkeeping → export under Permissions on their row. They can then read and export, but neither post nor reverse.

Note

The BU key column is left empty on purpose. The accounts used are automatic accounts that already carry their rate (8400 = revenue at 19 % VAT). An additional tax key is the standard way to have VAT applied twice on import.

A practical month

1. Write and send invoices — as you go.
2. Scan receipts as they arrive — do not collect them.
3. At month end import the bank statement or run the bank sync, confirm the unambiguous matches.
4. From invoice for every outgoing invoice not yet posted.
5. Review the journal, then finalise.
6. Open UStVA, report the amount payable to the tax office.
7. DATEV export to your tax adviser.