How a sale or expense actually posts
The real journal entries BusinessCopilot creates behind every sale and expense.
The general Accounting section explains what happens automatically when you make a sale or pay an expense in plain terms. This page covers the real mechanics behind that — the actual journal entries BusinessCopilot posts, useful once you need to trace a number back to its source.
A journal entry is a balanced record of one accounting event — every entry has one or more debit lines and one or more credit lines that add up to the same total. BusinessCopilot posts one automatically for nearly everything that happens in the product; you never have to create these by hand unless you're recording something the product itself didn't generate. See Recording a manual journal entry for that case.
When a sale completes
A sale posts one balanced journal entry with up to three parts:
- The payment side (debit) — whichever account the money actually landed in: a Cash or Bank account you chose at checkout, Undeposited Funds if it was a card payment or otherwise not confirmed at a specific account yet, or Accounts Receivable if it's a credit sale not yet paid.
- Revenue and tax (credit) — Sales Revenue for the amount net of tax, plus a tax-payable line if the sale had VAT applied.
- Cost of goods sold — a separate debit to Cost of Goods Sold and credit to Inventory, for what the item(s) sold actually cost you (using the cost recorded on the item at sale time). This is what lets Profit & Loss show your real gross profit, not just revenue.
Selling, canceling a sale, and processing a return all post their own correctly-reversed entries — nothing is edited after the fact, only added to or reversed.
When you record an expense
An expense posts a simple two-line entry:
- Debit the expense category's mapped account (e.g. Rent, Utilities, Salaries).
- Credit whichever account paid for it — a Cash or Bank account, or the Petty Cash account if it was drawn from a petty cash fund.
Where you see this
- The General Ledger shows every posted line for one account, in order, with a running balance.
- Every entry links to its source — selecting a journal number from the Ledger takes you to that entry's own detail page, showing exactly what it debited and credited.