Sales · Purchasing · Inventory · Accounting
Ledgerly runs the cycle a small business actually has: an order, the stock that leaves the shelf, the invoice, the money. What makes it an ERP rather than four disconnected tools is that each of those is one event, recorded once, in a set of books every report is computed from.
The shortest honest summary of the product. Four documents move the books without touching stock, three move stock and the books in one transaction, and three touch stock while posting nothing.
| Document | Stock | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales order | Commits the quantity | — | — |
| Delivery | Leaves the warehouse | Cost of sales | Inventory |
| Invoice | Untouched | Receivable | Revenue, tax payable |
| Receipt | Untouched | Cash | Receivable |
| Purchase order | Expected, not on hand | — | — |
| Goods receipt | Arrives, at cost | Inventory | Goods received |
| Supplier bill | Untouched | Goods received, tax | Payable |
| Payment | Untouched | Payable | Cash |
| Stock count (short) | Adjusted to the count | Stock loss | Inventory |
| Warehouse transfer | Moves warehouse | — | — |
A count that finds more stock posts the same entry the other way round, as a gain. Every posting above is balanced, unique to its document, and undone by a reversal rather than a delete. New to debits and credits? Start here →
Orders, partial deliveries, invoices and receipts — four documents because a sale rarely happens in one moment, and each of them means something different to the books.
Confirming a sales order commits the stock, so the same twenty units cannot be promised twice. It posts nothing, and that is the point: nothing has been earned and nothing has moved. An order you never ship has no business in an income statement.
Ship four of the ten and the order stays open for six. Each delivery costs its goods out at the moving average in force that day, so cost of sales posts in the transaction that moves the stock.
Invoicing posts the receivable, the revenue and the tax as one balanced entry; a receipt clears the receivable against cash. What a customer owes is read from the ledger, so the aging and the balance sheet cannot disagree.
Voiding a posted document books a reversing entry, so last month stays as reported. Products marked as services skip the stock ledger: a consultancy gets invoices, receipts, aging and full statements without a warehouse.
The same shape in reverse: order, goods receipt, supplier bill, payment. The interesting part is the middle, where goods and paperwork arrive on different days.
A goods receipt capitalises the stock at what you paid and books the other side to a goods-received accrual. The goods are on the balance sheet and the debt recorded, whether or not the paperwork has arrived.
The supplier bill clears that accrual and raises the payable, with tax. It does not debit inventory a second time. That double count is the specific mistake the two-step flow exists to prevent.
A purchase order shows the quantity as expected rather than on hand, so nobody sells stock still on a lorry. Like a sales order, it posts nothing. Payments settle the payable; the aging reads those postings.
Quantities per warehouse, one cost per product, and a movement ledger that explains how both got there.
Receiving blends the new cost into the running average; shipping costs out at the average in force at that moment. No cost layers to maintain, no revaluation run to remember — the movement updates the average.
Every quantity change is a row: what moved, from which warehouse, when, at what cost, and which document caused it. Rows are never edited. A correction is another movement, which keeps a stock figure explainable.
Count 98 where the system says 100 and the two units are booked as a loss, with a journal entry dated the day you counted. Shrinkage becomes a line somebody can ask about, not a field that quietly changed.
The average cost is held per product, so moving stock between warehouses changes where it is, not what the company owns. Reorder points flag what to buy before a shelf empties rather than after.
Costing decides what your gross margin says, so it is worth understanding first. How weighted moving average works, with numbers →
Not a summary of the other three modules — the general ledger they all post into, and the only place the reports read from.
Each journal entry is unique to the document that caused it, so posting is idempotent. A double-clicked button, a retried request or a replayed job produces one entry; revenue cannot be counted twice by accident.
Trial balance, income statement, balance sheet, receivables and payables aging, sales analysis and stock valuation are all computed from postings. The valuation reconciles to the inventory account because it comes from the movements that posted to it.
Lock a period and nothing can post into it: not a correction, not a late supplier bill, not an administrator. The correction goes into the open period, dated when it was made, where an auditor expects it.
Signing up installs a chart of accounts wired to the posting rules, plus tax rates, document numbering and a warehouse. Re-point a rule at another account later and everything already posted stays where it was.
You can also post a journal entry by hand for what no document covers — depreciation, an accrual, an opening balance. It faces the same balance check as everything else.
A handful of decisions made once, underneath all four, rather than four times with slightly different answers.
A feature list that only ever grows is one nobody can trust. These are the things people ask for that the product does not do, said here rather than discovered in week three.
You record that a customer paid; you do not take the card here. No card details reach the product, so there are none to lose.
No app store, no bank feed, no import or export tooling. What is in the system was entered in the system.
Books are kept in one currency. If you invoice in three and need them translated at closing rates, this is not your ledger yet.
No pay runs, no bills of material, no production orders. Buying, selling, holding stock and accounting for all three is the scope.
A web application that behaves on a phone screen. Nothing to install, nothing to keep updated in a store.
What is left is the part most small businesses are still doing in a workbook, badly. Where spreadsheets stop being enough →
Sign up, raise one invoice, then open the trial balance and the journal entry it wrote. A minute, and it tells you more than any feature list, including this one.
No card. Back to the overview