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The finan plugin

The lino_xl.lib.finan plugin adds functionality for recording financial vouchers (i.e. cash statements, bank statements, payment orders and journal entries) and receiving booking suggestions.

Table of contents:

Vocabulary

There are three kinds of financial vouchers:

financial voucher

General term for the voucher types bank statement, payment order and journal entry. These three voucher types are quite similar but use different database models because certain details differ.

Cash and bank statements

cash statement

A numbered voucher where you declare a starting balance (how much money you had in your cash drawer in the beginning), a series of expenses and receipts that you made using that money, and an ending balance (how much money you had in your cash drawer in the end).

bank statement

A numbered voucher received from your bank where the bank reports the transactions that occurred on a given bank account during a given period. It also reports the a starting balance and ending balance of that bank account.

Cash statements and bank statement are stored in a same database table (they use the same database model) because they have the same data structure. Their only difference is that the cash drawer of a bank statement is virtual.

Payment orders

payment order

A voucher you send to your bank asking them to execute a series of payments (outgoing transactions) to third-party recipients from your bank account.

A payment order clears the invoices it asks to pay. Which means for example that a supplier might tell you that some invoice isn’t yet paid, although your MovementsByPartner says that it is paid. The explanation for this difference is simply that the payment order hasn’t yet been executed by your or their bank.

Lino books the sum of a payment order into a single counter-movement that will debit your bank’s partner account (specified in the partner of the journal). Your bank becomes a creditor (you owe them the sum of the payments) and you expect this amount to be cleared by an expense in a bank statement which confirms that the bank executed your payment order.

Cash journals

Cash journals are technically the same as bank statements.

Journal entries

French: “operations diverse”.

journal entry

A voucher where you declare that you move money around internally, for your own accounting.

Booking suggestions

expected movement

A ledger movement that did not yet happen but is expected to happen. For example the payment of an invoice.

booking suggestion

A suggestion to add an expected movement to a financial voucher. See Booking suggestions.

In a financial voucher you often book transactions that are actually expected. For example, when you have booked an invoice, then Lino knows that each invoice will eventually lead to a payment.