Most of your numbers arrive on their own. The bank feed reports what moved, QuickBooks reports what your bookkeeper coded, and your field software reports what you invoiced.
A journal entry is for everything else.
When you need one
Every example here has the same shape: money did not move, or it moved between things you own and owe rather than in or out of the business.
- Depreciation. A truck loses value every month and no bank line says so.
- An owner contribution or draw. Money you put in or took out is not revenue and not an expense.
- Loan principal. The interest is a cost; the principal is you paying down what you owe.
- Opening balances. What the business already owned and owed on the day the books start here.
- An accrual. Work you have earned but not billed, or a bill you owe but have not paid.
- A correction. Something posted to the wrong account or the wrong month.
How to record one
Go to Accounting → Journal Entries and choose New entry.
Each line names an account and an amount, on one side or the other. Debits go on the left, credits on the right, and the two columns have to match before the entry can be posted. The running total at the bottom shows the difference as you type, and balance on any line drops the difference onto that line.
If you are not sure which side something goes on, the shortest reliable rule is: what the business has more of goes on the left, what paid for it goes on the right. Buying a $60,000 truck with a loan is a debit to Fixed Assets and a credit to Notes Payable — you own more, and you owe more.
Which reports it counts on
Every entry states its basis, because it changes the number.
- Both bases is the usual answer for something that really happened.
- Accrual only is for something earned or owed where the cash has not moved yet.
- Cash only is for a cash-basis adjustment that should not touch your accrual reports.
Lines on balance sheet accounts are unaffected either way. Buying equipment is never an expense, on any basis.
Drafts and posting
A draft is saved and changes nothing. Posting is what puts it on your books, and it is a separate, deliberate step.
Posted entries cannot be edited
This is on purpose, and every accounting system works this way. Once an entry is on the books, someone may have already read a report built on it.
To fix one, reverse it. That writes the opposite entry, leaves both visible, and you post a corrected one. Anyone reading the books later can see what happened and when it was put right, instead of finding a number that quietly changed.
Void is for an entry that should never have existed at all. It needs a reason, and the entry stays in the journal with that reason attached.
Closing the books
Once a year is filed, close it. A closed period refuses new entries dated inside it, so nobody backdates something into a return you have already submitted.
The lock covers entries made here. It cannot stop QuickBooks or your bank feed from reporting a backdated transaction, because those are other people's systems — so treat it as protection against your own team's typos rather than a seal on the period.
You can reopen a period if you genuinely need to.
Closing the year
Locking a period stops new entries. Closing the year is a separate act: it moves that year's profit out of revenue and expenses and into retained earnings, so the new year starts from zero and the profit you already earned sits in equity where it belongs.
Omnyra shows you the entry it would post before it posts anything: every account it will close, the amounts, and the retained earnings figure at the end. Categories that have no account of their own are named rather than folded in silently.
Closing does not change any report for the year you closed. A profit and loss for last year reads exactly the same after the close as before it, because the closing entry is dated at the year end and the report covers the year. What changes is that the next year starts clean.
Close the years in order. Omnyra tells you which year is next and will not let you skip one, because retained earnings accumulate and closing 2026 before 2025 would carry the wrong opening figure forward.
Seeing what a line did
Any line in your general ledger opens a Debits and credits panel showing both sides and which of them is an asset, a liability, equity, revenue or a cost.
Entries you posted here show every line exactly as you entered it. Lines that came from your bank feed show one real side and one worked out from the direction the money moved — that half is grayed and labeled, so you can tell what was recorded from what was inferred.