The account the money moves through. The invoices you are already issued. The statements your bank already sends. The spreadsheet somebody in the office already keeps. Almost everything a set of books needs has been written down once — the work is getting it into one place and keeping it in order. That is the work Core Ledger does, and it is why the proof is already made on the day somebody asks for it.
Nothing posts on arrival. Each row sits in a queue with the likely answer already filled in, and waits for the one judgement only you can make. Confirm the three below and watch what the queue does.
An invoice already carries everything the record needs. Upload it and the fields come off the page into the form — and the document stays attached, so when a figure is questioned the thing it came from is one click away rather than in a drawer somewhere.
Ridgeway Supplies Ltd
14 Oregun Road, Ikeja · TIN 20894471-0001
Not filed elsewhere and referenced by number — attached, so the figure and its evidence open together three years later.
A misread digit is a typo you can see before it becomes a number in your accounts. Read-and-confirm, never read-and-post.
Lines are read off the statement, summed, and checked against the opening and closing balances printed on the statement itself. Both outcomes are worth seeing, so here they are.
If you typed an expense last week and the statement now shows the same payment, it is offered as a match against the record you already have. Double-posting is the usual way an import ruins a set of books, and it is the specific thing this step exists to prevent.
Whatever is currently in spreadsheets comes in as a file, checked row by row against what that record type actually requires. A bad row fails on its own — you get the good ones and a short list to fix.
A ledger that starts at zero produces reports that are current and wrong. Opening balances put the business where it actually was when you began, so the first balance sheet is a statement about your company rather than about your first month using software.
This is also where an existing capital allowance position carries across. Relief already claimed on assets you bought years ago, and the unrelieved balance still to come, both continue from where your last schedule left them — rather than restarting and quietly overstating what you can still claim.
However a record arrived, it is the same entry from here on. Nothing between these stages is re-keyed, which is another way of saying there is nowhere for two versions of a number to appear.
Two people usually share a set of books, and both of them have to be able to work this way. Nothing here asks a business owner to learn double-entry, and nothing here asks an accountant to accept a figure they cannot open.
This is the point of the four routes. Each document is built from posted entries, so it is current on the day it is requested rather than on the day it was last prepared — and every figure on it opens back to the transaction underneath.
Worth knowing before you start, because a tool that overstates what it automates costs you more than one that does less and says so.
A bank feed carries an amount, a date and a narration. It does not carry tax treatment, so those fields are left for you to set on the record once it exists.
Extraction reads a document and fills the form. Nothing posts until you have looked at it — which is the whole reason the confirm button exists.
Whether a payment is an expense or a purchase, which category it belongs to, whether it is deductible — the software proposes the likely answer and you decide.
The pattern in all three is the same. Core Ledger removes the transcription and does the arithmetic. The judgements stay with the person who is accountable for them, which is also the person whose name is on the return.
Linking one account and letting a fortnight of transactions arrive is the fastest way to see whether any of this fits how your business actually runs.
