Banksالمصارف

A bank in Libra is set up in two layers: one chart account that says "this is money at a bank", and one auxiliary record per individual bank account underneath it. Getting the second layer right is what makes bank reconciliation work at the end of the month.

For the click-by-click version see How to open a bank account.

Where 512 sits

The shipped account is 512 Banks, and it is two levels down - not a class of its own:

5 Current Assets → 51 Financial Institutions → 512 Banks

Its siblings under 51 are 511 Checks & Coupons For Collection and 519 Financial Institutions. Cash is a separate branch, 53 Cash, covered in Currencies & cash.

How you split 512 is your decision

512 arrives as a single account. Whether you divide it, and how, depends on how the business actually holds money, this is a design choice, not a setting Libra ships.

This Reasoning is Worth Borrowing:

An e-wallet belongs beside the banks rather than in cash: it holds your money, you pay out of it, and you get a statement for it behaviourally it is a bank account with an app instead of a branch.

If your business only ever has one local bank, one account under 512 is enough. Split it when the split will actually tell you something you want on a report.

One Auxiliary record per Bank account - not per Bank

This is the rule that matters. A bank is not an account. An account at a bank is an account.

One bank commonly holds several accounts for the same company an LBP account and a USD account at minimum, often more than one of each. If they all share one Libra record, the balance you carry can never be matched line by line against a bank statement, because the statement covers one account number and your record covers several.

So open one record per bank account, and put enough into the name to tell them apart. The training's convention is bank · currency · account number:

Bank Audi - LBP - 123456

Everything else is the ordinary auxiliary record described in The Auxiliary Accounts screen - set List to the bank list first, then pick the account, and List locks when you save. Libra assigns the Id itself; bank records land in the 510001 range.

Done for a real company, the list shows the same bank several times over - which is the point:

Bank Audi - LBP - 123456, Bank Audi - USD - 123457 and Bank Audi - EUR - 123458 are one bank and three records, because they are three account numbers and three statements.

E-Wallets are Banks

A payment wallet (Whish and the like) collects money for you and pays money out of you, and gives you a statement of both. That is a bank account with an app instead of a branch, so it is modelled exactly like one: on 5123 Bank E-Wallets, with one record per wallet account, in the same 5100xx family as the banks.

The reason it is per account and not per provider is the same as for banks. If you hold two separate wallet accounts with the same provider, each one collects on its own and pays out on its own, so each one needs its own balance to reconcile.

One thing wallets add: the transfer fee. Put 101 through the wallet and 100 arrives the missing 1 is an expense, not a difference in the balance, and it is booked as one. See expense suppliers for where charges like that belong.

Locking the currency

Naming a record - LBP - documents your intention. Account restrictions enforces it.

It is a button in the toolbar of a saved auxiliary record, and it holds a small grid of Account + Currency pairs. Add 5121 Bank Local + LBP to the LBP record and from then on Libra refuses to post dollars through it. Do the same on the USD record with USD, and the two can never be mixed up by accident on a voucher.

That is the whole mechanism: the currency is not locked on the chart account, it is locked on the record, one bank account at a time.

The button only works on a record that already exists. Account restrictions cannot be opened while you are still creating the record save it first, then reopen it and set the restriction. The dialog names the record it belongs to at the top, so you can always see which one you are pinning.

Why the effort pays off

Because each bank account is its own Libra account:

• its balance can be reconciled against that bank's statement, line for line;
• a transfer between two of your own bank accounts is a plain entry from one to the other, with no special handling;
• a wrong-currency posting is refused at entry instead of being found three months later.

Next: How to open a bank account · The Auxiliary Accounts screen · Key rules & account quick reference.