Receipts, payments and transfers: money in and outالمقبوضات والمدفوعات والتحويلات: دخول المال وخروجه

A journal voucher can record anything, including money coming in and going out. But money moves so often, and always in the same shape, that Libra gives it three screens of its own - Receipts, Payments and Internal transfers. Use them instead of a journal voucher: they do the accounting for you, they cannot be put the wrong way round, and they capture the things a voucher has nowhere to put - a cheque number, a bank, who the cheque is made out to.

To record one step by step, read How to record a receipt and How to record a payment or a transfer.

1. Two grids instead of one

A journal voucher is one grid where you decide, line by line, what is debited and what is credited. These three screens are two grids, and which grid a line goes in already decides its side. You never choose debit or credit.

The lists look and behave exactly like the journal voucher list - same columns, same filter row, same ribbon - so everything in guide 33 about finding and reading them applies here too.

2. The three shapes

Open a new document on each of the three screens and the difference is immediate.

A receipt - money arriving. The top grid is what you received; the bottom grid is who it came from.

A payment - money leaving. The same two grids, the other way round: the top grid is what you paid for, the bottom grid is how you paid.

An internal transfer - your own money moving between your own accounts. Here both grids carry a Kind, because both sides are money.

The rule underneath all three: the grid carrying the Kind column is the money side. On a receipt it is on top, on a payment it is at the bottom, and on a transfer it is both.

3. Kind: the one field that does the work

Kind says how the money moved - cash, cheque, bank transfer. Picking one fills in the account for you, so nobody has to remember which account the cash box is.

The list of kinds is not fixed by Libra. It is set up per company on the Payment and receipt screen, and it is worth looking at once so you know what your own list means:

Each row ties four things together:

Two of the kinds are easy to mix up. Check is a cheque you write yourself, drawn on your own company chequebook. Check jiro is a cheque someone else already wrote - one you are holding and passing on to a third party instead of depositing it or writing your own.

A kind that requires a cheque number really does refuse to save. Leave it blank and the save is rejected with Enter Check number - the document is not written, and nothing is lost; fill the Check number column in and save again.

4. Everything else works like a journal voucher

The rules you already know still hold, and it is the same bar at the bottom of the screen:

• Debits must equal credits, in both company currencies. Until they do, Totals are not matching shows in red and the document will not save.
• Each line carries its own currency and its own rate, and the equivalent columns are filled in for you.
• F12 saves, and the number is assigned then, not before.

Mixed currencies work here exactly as they do on a voucher. This receipt takes cash into an LBP account from a client whose account is held in USD; neither side was converted by hand:

5. The number tells you which screen made it

Every document made on these screens carries the same branch-year-kind-sequence number as a journal voucher, and the kind letters are what separate them:

So the number alone tells you where a document came from, which is useful when you meet one in a statement or a report months later.