Recording transactions: income, expenses & transfers

Record income, expenses, transfers, capital contributions and opening balances — then post them to the general ledger.

What recording a transaction means

In Qontab a transaction is a single financial event — money you spent, money you received, cash moved between your own accounts, capital put into the business, or the starting balances you carry over from a previous system. Recording one creates a balanced double-entry journal entry: every transaction has a debit and a matching credit, so your books always stay in balance. One unified form captures all of them, and Qontab writes the correct debits and credits for you.

You never hand-write the ledger lines. You describe the event in everyday terms — “I paid 1,200 for hosting” — and Qontab translates it into the right accounts behind the scenes.

Five transaction types

The New transaction screen opens with five tiles. Each one asks for just the fields that type needs and posts the appropriate double entry:

• Expense — money leaving the business. Debits an expense category, credits the bank account; VAT and a personal/company split are optional.
• Income — money coming in. Debits the bank account, credits a revenue category, with optional VAT.
• Transfer — cash moved between two of your own accounts. Each leg carries its own currency and FX rate, so a USD-to-MUR transfer still balances in your base currency.
• Capital contribution — an owner or investor injecting fresh cash. Debits the bank, credits an equity account.
• Opening balance — the starting figures you migrate from another system. Same shape as a capital contribution, but tagged so reports and tax math can tell them apart.

Attach a receipt or invoice to any of them, tag a project for cost tracking, and pick the currency per line.

Draft, post and edit

Every transaction follows the same short life: draft → posted. A draft is a work in progress that doesn’t touch your balances yet; posting commits it to the general ledger, where it counts toward your reports and is assigned a sequential number (JE-2026-000123).

• Edit in place — change a posted entry and Qontab rewrites it directly. It keeps the same sequential number and re-links every attached document. There is no reversal entry; the corrected figures replace the old ones cleanly.
• Delete — removing a posted entry is a hard delete: the entry and its lines are gone from the ledger. Use it only for something that should never have been recorded.

Record a transaction

1. Open New transaction and pick a tile — expense, income, transfer, capital contribution or opening balance.
2. Fill in the date, amount, bank account and category. Add VAT, a currency, a project or a receipt where they apply.
3. Save as draft to review later, or post it so it immediately affects your balances and reports.
4. Later, edit the posted entry in place to fix a figure, or hard-deleteit if it shouldn’t exist.

Currency on every line

Qontab is multi-currency to the line. Each journal line stores its currency, its exchange rate to your base currency, and the resulting base debit and base credit. That’s why a transfer between a USD account and a MUR account still balances, and why your reports consolidate everything into one base currency no matter how each line was entered.

If a historical rate is missing, the line still posts and you can re-derive the base amounts later — see multi-currency and FX for how rates are stored and refreshed.

Record with AI (MCP)

Connected to an AI assistant through the Qontab MCP connector, recording becomes a sentence. The assistant calls the matching write tool — create_expense, create_income, create_transfer, create_capital_contribution or create_opening_balance — and then post_transaction to commit a draft to the ledger. To fix a figure it uses edit_transaction (in place, keeping the number); to remove one, delete_transaction. A whole batch of drafts can be committed at once with bulk_post_transactions.

FAQ