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Entering Transactions

An introduction into how to enter transactions, starting with a simple transfer between bank accounts to adding an expense.

 

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A transaction in Easy Books is a transfer of money from one account to another. For example, you could enter a transaction between your bank account and savings account to represent some money moved into savings. After saving the transaction, the balances of both accounts are affected, with a reduction in your bank account and an increase in your savings account. This is reflected in the balance sheet, but note there is no effect on your Profit & Loss because the transaction is not linked to an income or expense account. In other words, you haven't made any money or lost any money. You've simply transferred money from one bank account to another.

Now let's record an expense. I purchased some cartridges for a printer using a company credit card. With Accounts selected in the sidebar, choose the credit card and click the button at the top of the transaction list to add a new one.

I'm going to demonstrate entering the transaction using the keyboard this time.

To set the date, type it in the format shown. If you prefer using a calendar, click the button to the right and choose the date. As a shortcut, if you are entering a transaction with today's date you can just type SPACE. Use the TAB key to move to the next field. Account 1 is already selected as the credit card so press TAB again to move to the Transaction Type. This is also correct, but if we wanted to make a change, tapping the DOWN arrow brings up the alternatives and the RETURN key selects which one we want.

The Description field is used to record the item so you can recognise it from your credit card statement.

For Account 2, pick a suitable expense account such as General Admin. As before I could use the arrow keys, but Easy Books also allows you to start typing the account name, in this case just typing "G" is enough.

I have the foreign currency add-on installed, so I have the oppertunity to select the currency here. My credit card is in Pounds Sterling, so I'm going to TAB to the next field.

Here I type the amount paid. Note the app is expecting an amount inclusive of tax because when paying using a credit card you're more likely to have the total amount you paid shown on the receipt.

The receipt shows VAT paid at the standard rate, so I'll select that rate using the dropdown options.

The VAT amount agrees with the receipt in this case, otherwise I could make changes to the amount field before saving it. Since the business is registered for VAT, we will claim back the £4 tax paid, meaning the cost to the business is £20.

Now I've finished entering the purchase I'll use CMD+RETURN to save it. Note that if you're entering a lot of transactions in one account, you can speed things up by using CMD and the EQUALS key instead to save this and add the next in one step.

As you enter more transactions, Easy Books learns from your entries and will offer to auto-complete things like descriptions, account names and so on.