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Getting started and permissions ​

What Bookkeeping covers ​

Bookkeeping is a double-entry journal: every entry has a debit side and a credit side that balance to the cent. Most entries are created for you, derived from records that already exist elsewhere in Gurita:

  • Bookings — the room/cabin revenue on a confirmed booking (and the reversal when a booking is cancelled), split by product category where a booking uses a price-variant package.
  • On-site room charges — extras billed to the room during a stay.
  • Booking payments — money received against a booking, including the fee an online payment provider deducts.
  • POS sales — point-of-sale bills and their payments.
  • Bank entries — lines recorded on a bank account.
  • Stock and ingredient purchases — product and ingredient restocking costs.
  • Boat maintenance — dive-boat maintenance and repair costs.
  • Supplier invoices — bills you enter and later mark as paid.
  • Payroll runs — wages and salaries paid out in a batch.
  • Recurring templates — postings you schedule yourself (rent, subscriptions, salaries).
  • Manual entries — anything you book by hand.

Every one of these lands as a proper double-entry posting in the Journal, with an account, a department, and — where relevant — VAT. You never have to build the two sides of an entry yourself for an automatic posting; you only step in when something needs a receipt, a correction, or a manual entry from scratch.

Per-asset books, one shared chart ​

Each property (asset) has its own books: its own journal, its own month-by-month balances, its own opening balances per account, and its own period locks. All figures on the Bookkeeping page — the journal, the KPI strip, the statements, the suspense queue — follow the active asset you have selected in the top bar, the same way most of the app does. To see several properties added up, switch the page to the combined view — the books themselves stay separate, the view only reads them together.

The chart of accounts and the posting rules, however, are shared across every asset in your company. Recurring templates belong to one asset each, like entries — see Recurring entries. Everything posts in the company's base currency; an entry originating in another currency is converted at the day's rate and keeps its original amount and currency alongside the converted figure.

Turning it on ​

To activate Bookkeeping:

  1. An administrator turns on the Accounting module: Settings → Active Modules, in the Finance & Payments category. See Active Modules.
  2. Set a bookkeeping start date — the first day the ledger should exist. Until a start date is set, nothing can be booked into the ledger (manual entries, supplier invoices and payroll runs are all rejected with "Set a bookkeeping start date first", and any date before it with "That date is before the bookkeeping start date"). The start date, the list of departments, the default VAT rate, and the default payment method → account mapping all live on their own Bookkeeping tab in Settings — Settings → Configuration → Bookkeeping (visible to administrators once the Accounting module is on). See Configuration and Tax.
  3. A fresh install seeds a standard chart of accounts (34 accounts covering fixed and current assets, equity, liabilities, income and expenses) and a default department list of just General — add more departments and adjust the chart to fit your business from the Chart of accounts tab.
  4. Historical documents from before the module was switched on — bookings, payments, purchases and the rest, back to the start date — are brought into the ledger by a one-time backfill. This is an administrator action run outside the page itself (it isn't a button in the interface); it's safe to run more than once, since a second run reports zero additional changes rather than duplicating anything (a re-run may report entries as relabelled — their tax name was brought up to date in place, with no amount changed). Opening balances per account, per asset, are computed as of the start date.

Tip: Set the start date and departments before you turn the module on for day-to-day use — every automatic posting after that point depends on them, and a department that later drops out of the list is rejected on new entries (existing entries keep it, but you'll need to update any rule or mapping that still names it).

Departments, default VAT and the payment-method map ​

The Bookkeeping tab under Settings → Configuration (administrators only, shown once the Accounting module is on) holds four fields:

  • Start date — the ledger start date described above; leave it empty to keep the module dormant.
  • Departments — your own list of cost centres (for example Rooms, Diving, F&B), edited as a simple chip list; add one at a time and remove any you no longer need. The first department in the list is the default a posting falls back to, and the list can never be saved empty — every entry, automatic or manual, has to carry one. A posting whose named department has dropped out of the configured list falls back to the mapping or rule's own department, or otherwise this first one.
  • Default VAT rate — used only when nothing else supplies one (a booking line with no tax, a POS item with no tax, a manual entry left blank). The tab offers a dropdown of your configured tax rates plus 0% when those are available, and a plain percentage field otherwise.
  • Payment method → account map — one account-code field per payment method, decides which account a payment's other side (its contra account) posts to: Cash → Cash on hand, Bank/Cheques/Accounting → Bank — operating account, Credit Card/Debit Card/Mobile Payment → Card settlement account, an external payment provider → Payment provider balance (plus its fee, expensed separately), a voucher or customer credit → Guest deposits received, an agency credit → Agency credit balances, an employee or customer tab → House account receivables, a marketing comp → Marketing, an officer's comp → Credits & goodwill granted, and money collected by another property → the suspense account. Only the Temporary payment placeholder is skipped outright. You can override which account a specific payment method posts to per account, from that account's Payment methods tiles in Chart of accounts — a method claimed there always wins over this company-wide default. A method you leave blank in this map keeps its built-in default account — your entries only replace the methods they name, so a payment method added in a later Gurita version never falls into suspense just because your map predates it.

Saving is blocked, with an on-screen message, if the start date isn't a valid date or the department list is empty — everything else on the tab (VAT rate, account codes) saves as entered.

Who can access this ​

Bookkeeping has its own permission area, separate from every other permission you might already have:

ActionWhat it allows
ViewOpen the page and every tab; see the journal, statements, chart of accounts and mapping.
CreateBook a manual entry or save it as a draft.
EditPost or reverse an entry, assign a suspense item to an account, manage posting rules, edit accounts, manage recurring templates, and manage suppliers and payroll runs.

Two actions are deliberately not covered by a permission at all — they're gated on being an administrator, because they're irreversible in the way that matters most:

  • Locking or unlocking a month.
  • Marking a VAT period as filed.

The Accountant built-in role is granted the Bookkeeping permission's view, create and edit actions by default (but not delete, and not the admin-only actions above) — see Users and access.