Journal Entry Plans and Ledger Accounts
The Challenge
When your Novulo application supports multiple administrations—especially across different countries—you’ll often run into a problem:
Journal entries that are related to a product need to be booked on different ledger accounts depending on the administration.
This is because accounting regulations and ledger numbering schemes vary per country (or even per company). If you link ledger accounts directly to products, you’d need to maintain separate product setups for every administration, which quickly becomes messy and error-prone.
The Journal Entry Plan solves this problem by providing a single configuration point where you can define the correct ledger account for each administration.
Ledger accounts in a ledger administration
Within a ledger administration (grootboekadministratie), there are many ledger accounts (grootboekrekeningen), for example:
-
8000 – Turnover food
-
8010 – Turnover drinks
-
1300 – Accounts receivable
-
3000 – Stock
In the sub-administration, you need to register which ledger account each journal entry should post to.
Example:
-
Sales of a sandwich (food) → 8000
-
Sales of coffee (drinks) → 8010
This configuration happens at product level.
Why you don’t link ledger accounts directly to products
Problem: Ledger account numbering can differ per administration.
Example:
-
Netherlands → turnover accounts start with 8 (e.g. 8000)
-
Belgium → turnover accounts start with 7 (e.g. 700001)
If you linked ledger accounts directly to products, you’d need separate product configurations for each administration.
Solution: Use a Journal Entry Plan (boekingsschema).
How a Journal Entry Plan works
Using the sandwich example:
-
Sold in the Netherlands → post to ledger account 8000 in the Dutch administration.
-
Sold in Belgium → post to ledger account 700001 in the Belgian administration.
With a Journal Entry Plan for “Food,” you define per administration which ledger account to use.
This way:
-
You store the mapping in one place.
-
You simplify data entry in the sub-administration (e.g. Product Information Management).
-
You avoid duplicating product configurations for each administration.