The ledger is a double-entry journal of your payments. Every time a payment is recorded, changed or deleted in ThirdSectorBee, the Finance module writes a journal entry for it, so your finance team can follow how the money would be booked and trace any figure back to the payment behind it.
Before you start
- Module. Finance must be enabled for your beehive. If it isn’t, the page says Finance is not enabled for this organisation.
- Permission. You need
finance:read:ledger. Without it the page says You do not have permission to view the ledger.
The ledger is read-only. You change it by changing payments, not by editing entries.
Open the ledger
Open Finance → Ledger. The page is headed Ledger, Double-entry journal, newest entries first.
Each journal entry takes two lines, one for each side of the booking:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Date | When the payment was recorded, changed or deleted, not the date the money was paid |
| Payment reference | The ID of the payment the entry belongs to |
| Entry type | Original (blue) or Reversal (orange) |
| Currency | The payment’s currency |
| Account | The account each line is booked to |
| Debit, Credit | The amounts |
Entries are shown 50 at a time. Use Next and Previous to move between pages; the page number sits between them.
How payments become entries
| Payment | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound (money received) | The bank account | income |
| Outbound (money paid out) | expense |
The bank account |
The bank account line shows the identifier of the bank account chosen on the payment, or bank when none was chosen. The amount is the payment’s reporting amount where it has one, otherwise its amount.
- A new payment gets one Original entry.
- A changed payment gets two entries: a Reversal that cancels the previous version line for line, and a new Original for the payment as it now stands. This happens whenever the payment is edited, even if the amount stays the same.
- A deleted payment gets a Reversal only, bringing its balance back to nothing.
Nothing is ever removed from the ledger, so you can follow a payment’s whole history by its Payment reference. Entries appear shortly after the payment is saved, not instantly.
Things to know
- Every payment is booked, whatever its status, including Pledged and Invoiced payments.
- The page has no filters, search or export. To follow one payment, note its reference and look for the matching entries. An administrator or integration maintainer can fetch one payment’s entries through the Finance API, which accepts a payment ID filter.
- The account names are fixed: there is no chart of accounts to set up or change.
- For a payment in another currency that has a reporting amount, the ledger books the reporting amount but the Currency column shows the payment’s own currency. Check such entries against the payment before using them.
- Payments recorded before Finance was enabled for your beehive have no entries, and later changes to them aren’t booked either.
If something goes wrong
If the page shows Could not load the ledger., click Retry. If a payment you saved a moment ago isn’t listed yet, wait a moment and reload the page.
To record or correct a payment, see Record a payment or donation.