Bookkeeping

How journal entries get created

Spyral posts journal entries automatically from the documents you upload. Learn what triggers a posting, and why a document sometimes produces nothing.

Most entries in Spyral are not typed in and not asked for. They are posted automatically from the documents your team uploads, against the Luxembourg standard chart of accounts.

Uploading is what creates entries

When a financial document is uploaded, Spyral reads it, works out which companies it concerns, and posts journal entries to each of those companies' ledgers. Nothing else is needed. You do not have to open the chat, press a button, or ask for a ledger to be built.

This surprises people who expect bookkeeping to be a separate step. It is not. See Uploading documents for how documents get into Spyral in the first place.

What Spyral does with each document

It removes anything that document had previously posted, from every ledger.
It works out which of your companies the document actually concerns, as opposed to which are merely mentioned.
It checks that the document is a financial one.
It reads the amounts, dates, parties and tax treatment.
It writes journal entries into the right company's ledger, for the fiscal year the document date falls in.

Step 1 is why re-processing a document is safe. A document is never posted twice, and if you correct a document that was linked to the wrong company, its old entries do not linger on that company's books.

New entries arrive as Not reviewed. Where Spyral is less certain about what it read, the entry arrives as Needs review with a note telling you to check the source document. Nothing is treated as final until a person reviews it. See Reviewing a ledger.

Documents with two sides

A loan agreement, an inter-company invoice or a service contract concerns more than one company. If both sides are companies you track, Spyral posts to both, and it writes each set of entries from that company's own point of view. What is a receivable for one is a payable for the other.

Entries created for the second company are flagged Needs review, and the explanation on the entry says it was generated from that company's perspective as the counterparty on a document belonging to the other. Check those before signing them off. They are the entries most worth a second look.

When a document uploads but nothing appears

Careful

A document can upload perfectly, appear in the library, sit on the company profile, and still produce no journal entries at all. Nothing on screen tells you this has happened. This is the single most common source of confusion in bookkeeping.

There are three reasons:

The document was not classified as financial. A statute, a board minute or an RCS extract is a real document but not something to post. Spyral skips it silently.
Automatic bookkeeping is switched off for that company. See the section below.
Your firm has no usable bookkeeping template. This one is rare, because Spyral sets up a Luxembourg standard template the first time it is needed.

If a document should have produced entries and did not, check the company's Bookkeeping tab first to confirm automatic bookkeeping is on, then look at how the document was classified.

Turning automatic bookkeeping off for a company

Open the company, go to the Bookkeeping tab, and use the Automatic bookkeeping switch, labelled Post journal entries automatically. The same setting is on the company's actions menu as Enable bookkeeping and Disable bookkeeping.

Why you would turn it off. You track companies you do not keep books for. A lender bank appears on every loan agreement in the file, and a supplier may exist in your directory only so that documents can be tagged to it. Left switched on, every loan agreement would post entries to that bank's ledger, and you would spend your time reviewing books nobody asked you to keep. Switch it off for those counterparties and keep it on for your actual clients.

What still happens when it is off. Documents still upload and are still classified as usual. They simply stop posting journal entries to that company. Entries already posted are not touched or removed, and you can still create entries yourself through the bookkeeping chat.

When automatic bookkeeping is off, the ledger's empty state says so, rather than telling you to upload documents.

Asking for entries in the chat

The second route is to ask in the chat. This is useful for a defined batch rather than a running ledger, for example "journal entries for all invoices from March 2026" or "bookkeeping for the Deloitte invoices". You can give a date range and ask for the result as a file.

The chat replies with the totals, a balance check, and the first entries inline, then offers to adjust them, export them, or save them as a ledger.

Note

The bookkeeping chat replies in English, whatever language the rest of Spyral is set to. The ledger and entries it produces are unaffected.

The first time Spyral has what it needs for a company, it books the opening share capital entry once, and only once. It respects the Automatic bookkeeping switch in the same way as everything else, so a company with the switch off gets no opening entry.

Deleting a document

Deleting a document removes its journal entries from every ledger they were posted to, and the ledger totals are rebuilt. Entries that came from other documents are left alone.

Read Ledgers and fiscal years to understand where those entries land, which is not always the year you would expect.