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.

The training divides it three ways, and the 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.

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.

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.