Finance: Accounting, Banking & Tax

Overview: Dashboard Accounting: Chart of Accounts, Journal, Banking, Receivables, Payables, Bills, Expenses, Financial Reports, Budget, Recurring Entries, Accounting Periods Tax & GST: GST Profile, GST Registrations, GST Ledger, Filing Readiness, GST Filing, GSTR-2B Reconciliation, e-Invoicing, e-Way Bill Records: Evidence, Audit Log

Nothing else in Finance works until there is somewhere for money to land. Open Chart of Accounts and use Set up standard accounts — this provisions a conventional chart (assets, liabilities, equity, income, expenses) including the handful of system accounts the platform posts into by itself: Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Bank, Sales, Output GST, Input GST, Inventory Asset, and Cost of Goods Sold.

You can add your own accounts alongside them, rename anything, and group accounts under parents to whatever depth you like. What you cannot do is delete or deactivate a system account, because an automatic posting that suddenly has nowhere to go would fail silently at exactly the moment nobody is looking.

Periods are how a set of books gets closed. Open Accounting Periods, generate the months (or quarters) for your financial year, and each one moves through open → closed → locked:

• Open — entries can be added, edited and reversed freely.
• Closed — the normal end-of-month state. No new entries.
• Locked — the period is filed. It is never reopened.

Correction is always by reversal, never by edit. Reversing an entry leaves both halves in the account's history, which is what an audit asks for; quietly editing yesterday's number does not.

Most of what lands in your ledger you never type. When another module issues a document — a Service invoice, an Inventory sales invoice, a supplier bill, a credit note — or a payment is allocated against one, Finance posts the matching journal entry by itself, using the account each role maps to.

Journal shows every entry, automatic and manual, with its lines, its source document, and a Reverse action. To record something the platform cannot know about (a director's loan, a depreciation charge, an opening balance), use New entry and enter the lines yourself. Debits must equal credits before it will save.

When a document doesn't post

Two things are not retryable failures, so they are not treated as errors: a document with no accounting consequence, and a chart of accounts that isn't set up yet. Both surface as unposted documents on the Finance dashboard instead, with the reason. Automatic posting that silently does nothing would be worse than none at all.

Banking holds your bank and cash accounts, imported statements, and reconciliations.

• A bank account is not a ledger account. One is where money physically sits, the other is where it is recorded. Each bank account points at a ledger account, so three current accounts can share one "Bank" line on the balance sheet, or each have their own.
• Import a statement from CSV. The importer reads the header row to find your date, description and amount columns (including separate debit/credit columns), and it never drops a row silently — anything it cannot read is reported rather than skipped.
• Matching suggests, it never decides. Candidate matches come back ranked with the reason for each, and the amount is a gate: a wrong amount or the wrong sign scores nothing at all. Finance only claims "one clear match" when the best candidate is both confident and unrivalled. You confirm every match.
• Reconcile a statement period against the ledger. A reconciliation with a known, explained difference still records — a gap someone has accepted is a normal outcome, and refusing to save it just pushes the reconciliation into a spreadsheet nobody can see. "Reconciled" needs agreement and nothing left hanging.

Receivables ages what customers owe you, by customer and by invoice, in the usual buckets (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+). It reads the same invoices and payment allocations the rest of the platform already holds, so there is nothing to keep in sync.

• Bills — enter a supplier bill by hand: supplier, bill date, due date, line items, tax. Bills raised here are ordinary platform documents, so payments, parties and allocations work on them exactly as they do on a sales invoice. (A purchase order is deliberately not a payable — it creates no liability and is routinely for a different amount than what eventually gets billed.)
• Expenses — a faster path for the small stuff: pick the expense account, enter the amount, and optionally mark it paid on the spot, which records the payment in the same step.
• Payables — ages what you owe, by supplier and by bill, and is where you record a payment covering several of one supplier's bills at once.

Financial Reports produces, for any period you choose:

• Profit & Loss — income and expenses, with the period's result.
• Balance Sheet — assets, liabilities and equity. The period's profit appears as its own equity line: until the year is closed, nothing has moved trading results into retained earnings, and leaving that line out puts the sheet out by exactly the profit. That is the classic "my balance sheet doesn't balance", and it is a missing line rather than a broken ledger.
• Trial Balance — every account's debit and credit totals, which should agree.

• Budget — set a figure per account per period, then compare budget against actual with the variance.
• Recurring Entries — a journal template plus a schedule (monthly, quarterly, and so on). Entries are generated on their due date; each one is a normal journal entry you can review and reverse.

Neither uses AI. Finance is deterministic arithmetic, and the platform's own engineering rules say not to put a language model where arithmetic belongs.

A country/regime bar appears above every Finance tax page. Until you explicitly set one, your business defaults to India / GST — this is a default, not a real setting, and shows a "(default)" tag until you save an explicit choice.

To change it (requires edit permission): pick your country from the dropdown; if that country has more than one regime (e.g. the US has both Sales Tax and 1099 Information Returns), a second dropdown appears. The selection saves and applies immediately across every tax page.

Go to GST Registrations — its title adapts to your regime (e.g. "VAT registrations," "Sales Tax registrations," "GST/HST registrations"). Click to add a registration:

• India + GST: enter your GSTIN (15 characters, uppercase, validated against the standard format) and select a state jurisdiction.
• US or Canada: enter your registration number (EIN/permit number, or Canadian business number) and select a state/province jurisdiction.
• EU VAT countries: enter your VAT number — there's no jurisdiction field, since VAT registration is national, not regional.

Check "Set as primary" (checked by default) — the primary registration is the one every other document (invoices, e-way bills, tax splitting) uses. A registration's number and jurisdiction can't be edited after creation; to fix a mistake, cancel it and add a new one. From the registrations list you can also Suspend, Reactivate, or Cancel a registration, and — for India/GST only — edit additional profile details (registration type, return frequency, e-invoice eligibility).

• GST Ledger — your tax accounts in ledger form, reconciled against what the return says. If the two disagree, that difference is the thing to look at before filing.
• Filing Readiness — one pre-flight check before you file, drawing on the ledger, the sales and purchase registers, GSTR-2B, your bank reconciliation and the period lock. It tells you what is not ready, not just whether it is.
• GST Filing — builds a purchase register and sales register for a chosen month. This produces return-preparation output; it does not submit anything to a tax authority on your behalf.
• GSTR-2B Reconciliation — match your records against GSTR-2B/IMS-style exceptions for a chosen month. Sync exceptions pulls the latest, then Resolve or Dismiss each one. The input-tax-credit view shows what is claimable and what is at risk.
• e-Invoicing and e-Way Bill — see GSP credentials below; each has its own screen to issue and cancel documents.
• Evidence and Audit Log — supporting records and a change history for accountability.

A GST return covers the supplies of the business, not of whichever module raised the paperwork — Service invoices, Inventory invoices and bills entered by hand all count towards the same return.

If you file under India GST and need e-invoicing or e-way bills, you'll need credentials from a GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) — the government-mandated intermediary these documents must be submitted through. Enter these once on the e-Invoicing and e-Way Bill settings forms:

• GSP provider name
• Auth URL, Generate URL, Cancel URL (and optionally Status/Fetch URLs)
• GSP username and password
• Client ID and client secret

Your GSP issues all of these when you sign up with them — WonderArk doesn't provide a GSP relationship itself. Your password and client secret are encrypted at rest and only briefly decrypted at the moment WonderArk makes the one outbound call to your GSP that needs them.

Finance never hard-depends on Inventory or Service. If neither is licensed, you enter bills and expenses by hand and the ledger works exactly the same; if they are, their documents post into it automatically. Turning one off later stops new automatic postings — it does not remove what was already recorded.

URLs under the old /gst/... and /compliance/... paths (e.g. /your-business/gst/profile) still work — they redirect automatically to the equivalent /finance/... URL. Update any bookmarks when convenient, but nothing breaks if you don't.

Finance ships with real, dated regulatory content for each supported country/regime, but tax rules change. Treat the built-in rates and rules as a strong starting point, and verify against current regulations (or your accountant) before relying on this for an actual filing in production.