Bookkeeping: the books write themselves

Gurita has always known what happened at your property. A booking was confirmed, a guest paid a deposit, the bar sold forty mojitos, the boat got a new impeller. What it never did was write any of that down the way an accountant wants to read it: a debit, a credit, an account, a period.

So at the end of every month somebody exported a few lists, opened a spreadsheet, and typed the same month into a second system. That second system then disagreed with the first by a few euros, and an afternoon went into finding out why.

The new Bookkeeping module ends that. It is a real double-entry ledger, it lives inside Gurita, and most of it fills itself in.

You don't type it in

Every entry in the journal has two sides that balance to the cent. For almost all of them, you never build those two sides yourself. Gurita derives them from what already exists:

• confirmed bookings, and the reversal when one is cancelled
• on-site charges put on a room during the stay
• booking payments, including the fee an online payment provider keeps
• POS sales and how they were paid
• bank lines
• stock and ingredient purchases
• boat maintenance costs
• supplier invoices and payroll runs
• recurring postings you schedule once, like rent or a subscription

On top of that you can book a manual entry whenever something happens outside Gurita. Pick income or expense, an account, how it was paid, the amount and the VAT rate, and the posting lines appear underneath, already balanced. If you need a different split, you can edit the lines by hand.

Which account does it land on?

That is decided on the Mapping tab. Every automatic source has a default account, and posting rules override the default where your business is different: dive courses to one revenue account, the restaurant to another, a department for each.

When nothing can decide, the entry is not dropped and nothing fails. It posts in full to 1900 Suspense and waits in a queue on the Mapping tab until somebody assigns the right account. A balance on 1900 is simply your to-do list.

Payment methods work the same way. Cash goes to the cash account, cards to the card settlement account, a payment provider to its own balance with the fee expensed separately. You can change any of it, per account, from the Chart of accounts.

A ledger you can't quietly rewrite

This is the part we argued about least. Once an entry is posted, it cannot be edited. Not by a bookkeeper, not by an administrator.

To correct it you reverse it. A mirror entry posts with the legs swapped, the original stays exactly as it was, and the two are linked. Then you book the right figures. The same thing happens on its own when the record behind an automatic entry changes: edit a booking after its revenue has posted, and Gurita reverses the old entry and posts a fresh one. The full history stays readable, which is the whole point of a ledger.

Only a draft can be changed or deleted. That is what drafts are for.

Months work the same way. An administrator locks a month when it is finished, in order, one after the other. If a late change tries to post into a locked month, Gurita moves the entry to the first open month and notes the date it really belongs to. The month you reported stays the month you reported.

The statements

Three of them, per property, for any month:

• EÜR, the cash-basis income statement: what came in, what went out.
• GuV, the accrual profit and loss.
• VAT, output VAT against input VAT, with the net amount owed and a filing history so you can mark a return as filed.

The VAT summary keeps one band per tax. That matters more than it sounds. In many places an item carries two taxes at once, a service tax inside the price and a VAT on top. Blending them gives you a rate like 22.11% that exists nowhere in your tax law. Gurita books one VAT line per tax instead, names each one, and lists the sale in both bands. The journal shows Service Tax 10% + VAT 11%, the entry's details show the amount for each, and a reversal carries the same taxes as the entry it cancels.

One chart, separate books

Each property keeps its own books: its own journal, its own balances, its own locked months. The chart of accounts, the posting rules and the recurring postings are shared across the company, and everything posts in your base currency. A payment in another currency is converted at the day's rate and keeps its original amount next to the converted one.

A fresh start comes with a standard chart of 34 accounts. Rename them, add your own, and open any account to see its entries, 25 at a time.

What about the months before today?

You pick a start date, and that is the first day of your ledger. Everything Gurita already knows from that date on is brought in by a one-time backfill, so you don't begin with an empty journal. It is safe to run again: a second run changes nothing, and it never duplicates an entry.

Turning it on

Bookkeeping is part of the Accounting module on the Premium plan. An administrator switches it on under Settings → Active Modules, then sets the start date, your departments and the default VAT rate under Settings → Configuration → Bookkeeping. Access is its own permission, so your bookkeeper can see the journal without seeing everything else. Locking or unlocking a month and marking a VAT return as filed stay with administrators, because they change what your company has reported.

Exports are there for the day your tax advisor asks: the journal and all three statements come out as CSV or Excel, and every account exports its own entries.

The full walkthrough is in the Bookkeeping documentation: getting started, the journal, the chart of accounts, mapping, the statements, recurring entries, supplier invoices and payroll runs, and the rules worth understanding before your first month-end.