Bookkeeping
Ledgers and fiscal years
How Spyral organises journal entries into one ledger per company per fiscal year, how fiscal years are labelled, and what each ledger state means.
A ledger holds the journal entries for one company for one fiscal year. Entries are posted into it continuously as documents arrive, so it fills up over the year rather than being produced in one go at the end.
Where to find a ledger
There are two ways in, and they show the same thing.
- Bookkeeping in the sidebar lists every ledger across all your companies, with its company, period, entry count, total, balance and status. You can search it and filter by company, year and status.
- The Bookkeeping tab on a company shows that company's ledger, with a Fiscal year selector at the top for switching between years.
How the fiscal year is decided
Spyral uses the Financial year end recorded on the company, which comes from its RCS extract and appears on the company's Overview tab. Only the day and month matter. A document is filed into the fiscal year that its own date falls inside.
A fiscal year is labelled by the calendar year in which it ends, not the year in which it starts.
A company with a 30 June year end has a fiscal year running from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. Every document in that range, including the ones dated July, August and September 2025, is filed under FY 2026.
Accountants look under the wrong year constantly. If entries you are certain exist are missing, change the Fiscal year selector to the following year before assuming anything went wrong.
Where no financial year end is recorded for the company, Spyral assumes 31 December, which makes the fiscal year and the calendar year the same.
If the year end on the company is wrong, correct it on the company record. Documents processed after that will be filed against the corrected year.
The four ledger states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Preparing | The ledger is being built. This appears while a chat request is running. |
| Ready for review | Entries exist and not all of them have been reviewed. This is where a working ledger spends most of its life. |
| Reviewed | Every entry in the ledger has been reviewed by someone. Spyral sets this by itself. |
| Failed | The ledger could not be built. The reason is shown on the ledger under Error. |
There is one more label you will see that is not a state of its own. A ledger showing Review requested is still Ready for review; it simply has an outstanding review request against it. See Requesting and assigning reviews.
The balance badge
Next to the ledger you will see either Balanced, or Off by an amount, with a hint showing total debits against total credits.
A ledger that does not balance is not blocked from ordinary use, but it cannot be filed. Use Manual review to find the entry that does not balance and correct it.
A new upload can un-finalise a ledger
A ledger you have already signed off can go back to Ready for review on its own.
When new entries are posted into a ledger that was Reviewed, Spyral moves it back to Ready for review and clears the reviewed date. This is deliberate and correct. The Reviewed badge means "a person has checked every entry in here", and the moment an unreviewed entry arrives that is no longer true. Leaving the badge in place would tell you something false.
In practice this happens when a late invoice for a closed year is uploaded, or when a document is re-processed. Nothing you reviewed is undone. Open the ledger, review the new entries, and it returns to Reviewed.
Deleting a ledger
A ledger and all of its journal entries can be deleted, and the deletion is permanent. Only administrators can do this. The source documents stay in the library; only the bookkeeping is removed.
Next
Read Reviewing a ledger for how to work through the entries.
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.
Reviewing a ledger
Work through a ledger entry by entry in manual review, correct what Spyral read, and finalise the ledger.