Odoo 16 Community Book

Journals

All accounting entries of a company will be recorded in accounting journals. Accounting journals are considered as the records of transactions in chronological order. In a business, we create a sales journal for customer invoices, a purchase journal for vendor bills, a bank journal for bank transactions, and a general journal for other miscellaneous operations. You can manage such journals effectively with the assistance of the Invoicing module. The transaction records are added to these journals in the form of journal entries. It is possible to keep a track of all your financial documents related to different business operations and transactions as journal entries in journals.

To get access to the Journals platform, you can go to the Configuration menu of the Odoo Invoicing module. The list view of the Journals window is shown below.

The window can be viewed in Kanban view also. You can observe the Journal Name, Type, Journal Groups, Short Code, and Default Account from the list view. Clicking on a particular journal will provide a detailed view of the data specified in the respective journal and you can make changes to the data if necessary. You can use default and customizable options to simplify the sorting processes. As default, you will get Favorites, Sales, Purchase, Liquidity, Miscellaneous, and Archived as filters.

Use the New button to create a new journal for your accounting operations. Clicking on the New button will lead you to a form view as shown below which can be used to create a new journal.

Here, you can specify the name of the Journal and Company in the respective fields. You can create five types of journals in Odoo which are Sales, Purchase, Cash, Bank, and Miscellaneous. Based on the type you select, the remaining tabs in the form view will change. Let’s check each journal type separately.

Sales

In order to create journals for customer invoices, you can select the option Sales in the Journal Type field. After selecting the Type, you can set a Default Income Account for this journal under the Journal Entries tab. You can activate the Dedicated Credit Note Sequence field if you don’t want to share the same sequence for invoices and refunds made from this journal. Mention a Shirt Code, which will be used as a short name for display. The Currency used to enter a statement can be specified in the given space.

Under the Advanced Settings tab, you can set Control-Access. You can keep the fields empty for no control. Specify the Allowed Accounts in the respective field.

If the Lock Posted Entries with Hash feature is activated, the accounting entry or invoice receives a hash as soon as it is posted and it cannot be modified anymore. In the Payment Communications section, you can set a Communication Type that will appear on the customer invoices, once validated, to help the customer to refer to that particular invoice when making the payment. Set suitable Communication Standards in the given space. You will get a field to configure email servers to create invoices upon emails in Odoo. The activity you mention in the Schedule Activity field will be automatically scheduled on the payment due date to improve the collection process.

Purchase

The option Purchase can be selected in the Type field if you want to create journals for vendor bills.

In the Journal Entries tab, you can specify the Default Expense Account, Short Code, and Currency in the respective fields. Activate the Dedicated Credit Note Sequence if necessary.

Under the Advanced Settings tab, you can specify the Allowed Account in the Control-Access field. Configure email servers to create invoices upon Emails. Based on the requirement, you can activate the Lock Posted Entries with the Hash option.

Cash and Bank

When you select the Cash or Bank as the Type of Journal, you will get two additional tabs to complete which are Incoming payment and Outgoing Payment. You can use Cash and Bank journals to record your cash transactions and bank statements.

For the Cash option, you need to mention the Accounting Information under the journal Entries tab.

Here, you can mention Cash Account, Suspense Account, Profit Account, and Loss Account. The other fields are the same as those we mentioned earlier. The bank statement transactions will be posted on the suspense account until the final reconciliation allowing finding the right account. The profit account and loss account will be used to register a profit or loss, respectively when the ending balance of a cash register differs from what the system computes.

For the Bank option, you need to mention Bank Account and Account Number in the corresponding fields.

The Incoming Payments, Outgoing Payments, and Advanced Settings tabs are the same for both Bank and Cash options.

You can use the Add a Line button to add Payment Method and Name under the Incoming Payments and Outgoing Payments tabs.

All other business transactions can be recorded in the Miscellaneous Journals. You can create a suitable journal for your accounting operations from this window.

Journal Groups

Configuring different journal groups will allow you to easily categorize the journals in the Odoo Invoicing module. You can use the journal group as a filter option in the Journal window. From the Configuration menu of the module, you can select the Journal Groups option. This platform can be used to create and manage various types of journal groups. You can use the New button to create a new journal group for the module.

As you can see in the screenshot above, a new line will appear on the screen as soon as you click on the New button. Here, you can specify the Journal Group, Excluded Journals, and Company in the corresponding fields. Finally, click on the Save button to save the new data.