How this Help works

This panel always opens to the page you're currently on. Use the tabs at the top to read about another page, or the search box to find a topic by keyword.

Many controls in the app have a small ? next to them — clicking it opens this panel right at that control's explanation.

"It was there yesterday" — features that appear only when relevant

Several controls only show up when they have something to do. For example, a filter's "Show all" toggle only appears when a filter is actually active. So if you don't see an option you expected, it's usually because the data that triggers it isn't set up yet — not a bug. Each page's help calls out these cases under "Why don't I see…".

Signing in

On the login screen you enter your username and password. On success you land on the Dashboard, and the app loads your profile, branches, currencies, and access rights in one bootstrap so everything is ready. If your password is wrong or your account is inactive, the screen says so — an admin manages accounts in Settings → Access Rights.

Signing out

The sign-out button is the last icon on the top bar (top-right). It ends your session cleanly — it clears your local session data and returns you to the login screen, so it's the safe way to leave on a shared computer. The app also warns you before an idle session times out.

Page title

Names the page you're currently on — it updates as you navigate, so you always know where you are. The button to its left folds the navigation sidebar (covered in the Navigation topic).

⤢

The Live indicator

A green "Live" chip confirms the app is connected to the server and receiving updates. If connection is lost it changes, so you know when what you're seeing may be stale.

⤢

Workspace identity

Shows which workspace (company / subdomain) you're in, plus plan and usage — click it for detail. It's here so "whose books am I in?" is always one glance away, which matters if you work across more than one TheOrder tenant.

⤢

The clock

A live clock. Because the ledger records times in UTC, it helps to see the current time at a glance when you're posting or auditing dated activity.

The Help button

The yellow Help pill opens this help panel, defaulting to the page you're on. Every panel also has a "Take the tour" walkthrough, and many individual fields carry a small ? that jumps straight to their explanation.

The Settings shortcut

The gear opens Settings. From most pages it opens FILTERED to the settings panels relevant to that page (with an orange chip you can clear to see everything) — a fast path from a page to the config behind it. The sidebar's Settings item always opens the full, unfiltered list.

The notification bell

The Action-Center bell — its number and colours break down the work waiting on you (approvals, requests, reminders) versus work you've raised. Click it to jump to whichever side has open items.

Your profile

Your name (hover shows your username + branch), with a profile popover beside it for your account details. The sign-out button is at the very end — see the "Signing in & out" topic.

The navigation sidebar

Every page you can reach lives here, one click away. The current page is highlighted in its section's colour. On a narrow screen it slides over the content instead of pushing it.

Sections & pages

Pages are grouped into labelled sections, each with its own colour dot — so related work (orders, the finance ledger, HR, system config) clusters together. Items you don't have access to simply don't appear. A badge on an item flags work waiting there (e.g. pending approvals).

Folding the sidebar

Two ways to collapse the sidebar to a slim icon-rail (and back): the arrow / menu button on the top bar, or clicking the logo at the top of the sidebar itself. Collapsed, you still navigate by icon — hover shows each page's name. Your choice is remembered.

⤢

The count beside the page name

A count like "40 of 512" means 40 rows are loaded and showing after your filters, out of 512 in the database. It is not a page number — the grid loads more as you scroll. When a filter is on, the first number is what survived it, which makes the count the quickest way to see whether a filter is doing what you expected.

⤢

The search box — two different searches

This one catches people out, because the box does two things depending on whether you press Enter.

Typing filters the rows ALREADY LOADED, live, as you type. Pressing Enter runs a SERVER-WIDE search across the whole database — which is what you want when the record you're after isn't among the rows in front of you. If typing finds nothing, press Enter before concluding the record doesn't exist.

Both searches match EVERY column of the row, not a chosen few: text as a substring (case doesn't matter), a number as an exact value on every numeric column (an id, a quantity, an amount), a date as a prefix (2026-08 finds the whole month). So a SKU, a barcode, an amount or an id — typed or scanned into the box — finds its row on every page.

⤢

Cards / Table

Switches between the dense spreadsheet-style table and a roomier card layout. The button is labelled with the view you will GET if you click it, not the view you are currently in — so if it says "Cards", you are looking at the table.

⤢

Save View

Remembers your current filters, sort and view mode against your login, so the page comes back the way you left it next time. It saves what you have set right now — set the page up first, then click it.

⤢

The circular arrow — Reset or Refresh

Same icon, two jobs, depending on the page. Reset clears everything you have set — filters, search, sort and any selection — and reloads. Refresh only reloads from the server, leaving your filters alone; pages with little to clear use this one.

Either way it is the safe button: it never changes data, so when a page looks wrong or stale, click it first.

⤢

Include closed periods

On pages that touch accounting, an admin-only toggle brings records from SEALED fiscal periods back into view. They are hidden by default because a closed period is finished business and would otherwise pad every count and total you look at. Turning it on is a read — it does not reopen anything.

⤢

The Add / New button

Always the last control on the right, and always the strongest-looking one, labelled for the page — Add Vendor, New Order, New Report, Add Warehouse. On list-plus-form pages it opens the form in place, just below the toolbar, rather than taking you to another screen.

⤢

Buttons only some pages have

Anything beyond the standard row belongs to that page and is explained in its own help: Auto Seq and Reset Seq on Shipping & Packing, Shipping and Packing list on Orders, Update Rates from Internet on Currencies, Rebuild Balances and Collapse / Expand on the Chart of Accounts, Post All Drafts on the journals and treasury pages, CSV / TSV Import on HS Codes.

⤢

What it is, and when to use it instead of Export

Report Center builds a DOCUMENT: chosen columns, your filters, optional grouping and totals, laid out for a person to read, then printed or saved as Excel or PDF.

Export CSV builds a FILE: every column, no formatting, meant for a spreadsheet or for loading back into the app. Use Report Center when a human will read it — a listing for a client, a register for your records, a ledger for an auditor. Use Export when a machine or a spreadsheet will.

Choosing the columns

The builder opens with the page's usual columns ticked and offers every other field the record has. Tick what belongs in the document and untick what does not — a client-facing listing rarely wants your internal reference columns. Your choice applies to this document only; it does not change the grid behind it.

⤢

It inherits the filters you already set

Whatever the grid is showing is what the report covers — search, filter dropdowns, date range and all. So the way to scope a report is to scope the page first, then open Report Center.

The print title carries that context with it, so the finished document states what it is actually showing rather than claiming to be the whole list.

Grouping, totals and charts

Group by a column — branch, customer, category, currency — and the report breaks into sections with a subtotal each and a grand total at the end. On pages whose numbers suit it, charts can be added alongside the table.

Print, Excel, and saving the setup

Three buttons finish the job. Print sends the document to your printer — or to your system's Save-as-PDF, which is how you get a PDF; there is no separate PDF button. Excel produces a real spreadsheet with the grouping intact, so the totals stay live rather than being pasted in as text.

Save Query keeps the SETUP, not the document: the columns, filters and grouping you just built, ready to pull back with Load Stored View next time. A report you produce monthly is worth saving once.

⤢

The list one, and the record one

Several pages have Report Center in two places, and they do different jobs. On the toolbar it reports the LIST you are looking at. Inside an open record it reports THAT RECORD — one payment's voucher with its lines and allocations, one journal as a DR/CR T-account view, one sourcing request as a full offer comparison, one payroll period's slip sheet.

If the output is not what you expected, check which of the two you opened.

What you get

A .csv file, straight to your downloads, with one row per record and a column for every editable field. No formatting, no grouping, no totals — that is Report Center's job. This file is for working in a spreadsheet, or for loading back in.

Everything, or just what you're looking at

This is the one place the pages genuinely differ, so it is worth checking before you rely on a file.

On the entity pages — Vendors, Customers, Contractors — Export gives you EVERY record, whatever the grid is currently filtered to. On Products and Orders it gives you WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT, after your filters and sort.

Each page's own help says which it does. If you need a filtered file from a page that exports everything, filter it afterwards in the spreadsheet.

It round-trips back through Import

The columns Export writes are the columns Import reads, in the same shape. That makes the pair a bulk-edit tool: export, change many rows at once in a spreadsheet, import the file back. It is also how you move records between workspaces.

Where the button is

On most pages it sits in the top toolbar next to Export CSV. Two pages move it elsewhere for a reason. On Orders it does NOT — importing there means importing LINES INTO an order, so the button lives inside the New Order form beside Add Line, and again inside an existing order's detail view. That is why you will not find an Import button in the Orders toolbar: there is no order to put the lines in yet.

On Employees it lives on the Management tab, inside the Create panel as the Import event — because a bulk hire there is a journal: the preview becomes a Draft that goes through approval before anyone is created.

⤢

The column-mapping dialog

Pick your file and the dialog reads its header row, then shows one row per spreadsheet column with a dropdown to say which field it is. It pre-matches everything it recognises, so a file that came out of Export needs no mapping at all.

Below the mapping is a preview of the parsed rows exactly as they will be saved. Read it. Anything it cannot accept is flagged per row, with the reason on the row itself.

⤢

Which headers are accepted

The long headers a recent Export writes, and the older short form, are both accepted — so an older file still loads. Column ORDER does not matter; the mapping is by header, not position.

Insert-only, and what happens to duplicates

Import ADDS records. It does not update existing ones by matching on a name, so importing an edited export creates a second set rather than changing the first.

Where a clash would be harmless the row is kept and marked — a product name that already exists is saved as a version, "Name (2)". Where it would corrupt a key it is refused: a duplicate SKU or barcode is rejected with its own per-row message, and the rest of the file still loads.

⤢

The Branches column takes ID numbers

On Vendors, Customers and Contractors the Branches column wants branch ID NUMBERS — the values Export writes — not branch names. A name in that column will not match.

An empty Branches cell is not an error: it means "all branches".

Fields you can still fix during mapping

Some fields stay editable per row inside the preview, so a nearly-right file does not have to go back to the spreadsheet. On Employees, Grade and Department are editable per row, because both depend on the job title and a spreadsheet often has them inconsistent — and since that preview is building a journal draft there, fixing the row now is fixing the draft.

⤢

The control bar

The strip across the top scopes the WHOLE dashboard — change anything here and every zone below re-fetches to match. It holds the Period and Branch scope, an Include-closed toggle, the jump search, a freshness stamp with a Refresh button, and the gear that customizes your board. The next steps walk each control.

⤢

Period — the time window

Sets the time window for every metric and chart on the board. Open it and pick: Today, This Week, This Month, This Quarter, This Year, or "Custom range…" — which reveals a from/to date pair for any window you like. Everything below recalculates the moment you change it.

⤢

Branch — the location scope

Narrows the whole board to one branch, or "All Branches". Together with Period, this is the scope every tile, alert and chart is measured against. (You can also re-scope to a branch by clicking its row in the Performance zone below.)

Include closed periods

By default the board hides rows from sealed (closed) fiscal years, so the numbers reflect live activity. Admins get this toggle to switch sealed-year rows back ON across every zone — for audit or research — then off again. It's a separate axis from the Period window above.

Jump search — go straight to anything

The search box in the control bar searches EVERYTHING at once — you don't pick a category first. It matches:

⤢

• Order numbers (Ord#) and shipped-order numbers (SO#).
• Shipping bills and general bills.
• Customer, Vendor and Contractor names.

The KPI tiles

Your headline metrics. Each tile is a mini panel — never just a single number — and every tile is a doorway: click it to open the page behind it. The next steps walk each tile in turn.

⤢

Tile — Active Orders

Your live purchase orders. The big figure is the count; underneath, the tile breaks down total Quantity, Cartons (CTN), CBM (volume in m³) and Gross Weight, then the money — the value in each currency in play, with a single local-currency total below. A small status strip shows how those orders split across the stages (Pending / Confirmed / Part-received / …). Click the tile to open the Orders page.

⤢

Tile — Shipped Orders

The same rich breakdown as Active Orders — count, quantity, cartons, CBM, weight, and value per currency — but for cargo that has already shipped and been archived. It's your "what's gone out" figure for the period. Click to open the Shipped Orders page.

⤢

Tile — Customers

How many customers are in scope for the period, plus the volume (CBM, weight) and the money tied to them, shown per currency with a local-currency total. Click the tile to open the Customers page.

⤢

Tile — Vendors

The same shape as the Customers tile, for your suppliers: how many, their volume, and the money per currency with a local total. Click to open the Vendors page.

⤢

Tile — Contractors

Your service providers (freight, customs, inspection…): how many, how many bills they've generated, and the money per currency. Click to open the Contractors page.

⤢

Tile — Cargo Inventory

Goods physically sitting in your warehouses right now — this is stock on hand, NOT orders. It shows the number of item lines, cartons, CBM and weight, split by warehouse. Click to open the Inventory page.

Tile — Cash Position

Your current cash across all cash and bank accounts. Unlike the order tiles, this is a live balance SNAPSHOT — it reflects the accounts right now, not the selected period. Needs Finance access. Click to open the Chart of Accounts at those accounts.

Tile — AR / AP

The two sides of your working capital as live balances: Accounts Receivable (what your customers owe you) versus Accounts Payable (what you owe your suppliers). A quick read on who owes whom. Finance access; click to open the accounts.

Tile — Top Expenses

Your largest expense accounts by balance, so you can see where the money is going at a glance. Finance access; click to open the accounts.

Performance — Branches & Employees

A ranked breakdown of who's producing the work, in two tabs. Each row shows that branch's or person's order activity and total value for the period, sorted best-first with a ★ on the top performer.

⤢

• Branches tab — your branches side by side. Click a branch row to re-scope the WHOLE dashboard to it (every zone re-filters); a "← Show all branches" link clears it.
• Employees tab (admins) — staff side by side. Click a person to open their profile.

Needs Attention — every alert

The action list. Each tile is a real problem with a live count, and clicking it lands you on the EXACT records behind it (e.g. "Pending > 7 days · 7" opens those 7, not all of Pending). The alerts:

• Forgotten Pending — orders left Pending too long (default > 7 days).
• Delivery Delay — Confirmed orders overdue (default > 21 days).
• Warehouse Aging — goods sitting received too long (default > 14 days).
• Ready to Archive — Ready-to-Ship orders waiting to be shipped and archived.
• L/C Docs Missing · Documents Expired · Shipments Missing Docs — shipment-paperwork problems (logistics).
• Period Close Approaching · Opening Balances Incomplete — finance housekeeping.
• Awaiting my approval — requests other people sent you to action.
• My pending requests — requests you sent that aren't resolved yet.

The Launchpad — quick jumps

Launcher tiles into the pages you use most, each with a live count so you can gauge the workload before clicking. A tile just opens the page fresh — no filter is forced on you. The tiles (you only see the ones your role can reach):

• Active Orders and Shipped Orders (Orders module).
• Shipping Bills, General Bills, Payments, Treasury, Journals, General Ledger (Finance module).
• Pay Period (Payroll module).

The charts — one by one

The visual read of the same period + branch scope. Every slice uses the same colours as the rest of the app. The charts:

• Monthly Trend — orders and their value over recent months (area chart).
• Currency Mix — the share of your orders by currency, weighted by value (donut).
• Order Pipeline — how many orders sit at each lifecycle stage (bar).
• Alert Distribution — where your open alerts are concentrated (donut).
• Top 5 Customers / Vendors / Contractors / Products — who and what make up the biggest share (donuts).

Recent Activity

A live feed of what's happening across the workspace — created / updated / deleted, colour-coded (green / blue / red), most recent first. Where an entry points at a real record it's clickable: jump straight to that order or bill, or open the profile of the person who made the change. It's the quick "what just happened" pulse of the business.

Customize — the gear

The gear (⚙) at the far right of the control bar opens your personal dashboard preferences. The tour opens the panel for you in the next step.

Your dashboard preferences

This panel (the tour opened it) is yours alone and round-trips on your next login. You set your default Period and default Branch when the board loads, and — with checkboxes — exactly which KPI tiles, Launchpad tiles and charts you want to see. Tick what's useful, untick the noise; everyone shapes their own home screen.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Export, Import and Report each have their own section below. What is specific to this page:

• Filter dropdowns — Units, Currency, Category and Sub-Category, covered next.
• Low Stock — a chip under the row that narrows the grid to items at or below their reorder level.
• Cards / Table — the card view here groups products per category.
• Save View — remembers your view mode and the low-stock filter together.

The narrowing filters

Four dropdowns narrow the grid: Units, Currency, Category and Sub-Category. They stack (each narrows further), and Sub-Category cascades from Category — it stays disabled until you pick a category, and resets when you change it. Each clears back to "All".

The Low Stock filter

This pill shows only products that need restocking — anything at zero, or at/below its reorder limit. The number on the pill is how many currently qualify. Click it to show just those; click again to clear. It's the fast way to build a reorder shortlist.

⤢

The product grid

One row per product. Click a row to open it in the form; click the open row's header (or the fold arrow) to close it again.

⤢

• Click a column header to sort by it.
• The thumbnail cell — click a photo to enlarge it.
• A variant sits indented under its parent, with a link icon; a parent shows a "(N variants)" tag.
• The tick-box (left) selects rows for a bulk update — the bulk bar appears once any row is ticked.
• The action cell (right) has Duplicate (copy this product into a new form) and Delete (blocked if the product is used by any order or stock).
• Cards view groups the same products by category, with per-category stock and low-stock counts.

Adding or editing a product

Click Add for a blank form, or click any row to edit that product — it opens the same form just below the toolbar. The next steps walk through it field by field. Nothing is saved until you click Save at the bottom; Cancel (or the header) discards and closes.

⤢

Photo, Name & Specifications

The photo box on the left takes a click or a drag-and-drop image. Product Name is required and is what shows everywhere else (orders, packing, reports). Specifications is free text for the details — material, grade, dimensions in words — up to 100 characters.

Category, Sub-Category & Type

Category and Sub-Category classify the product (and drive the vendor narrowing below). "Product Type" (e.g. Whole-Set / Accessories / Spare-Parts) is a separate classification. Sub-Category cascades from Category. Use the small +New button beside each picker to add a new value straight into the lookup list without leaving the form (admins only).

Price, Currency & Exchange Rate

Price is the unit price in the Currency you pick beside it. Exchange Rate is that currency's rate to your local (books) currency — it auto-fills from the currency and is normally left alone. The gear/manage button by Currency jumps to the currency settings if you need to add or fix one.

⤢

Units, Reorder Limit & Stock

Units is the unit of measure (Pcs, Box, Set… from the lookup list; +New to add one). Reorder Limit is the level at which the product counts as "low stock" (and lights up the Low Stock filter). Stock is read-only here — it's the live on-hand quantity, driven by receiving and shipping on the Orders side; a new product starts at 0. Click the stock badge to drill into its inventory.

⤢

Default Vendor & the "Show all" toggle

The Default Vendor picker is narrowed to vendors that supply this product's category — so you pick from the right suppliers, not the whole list.

Open the picker and, when a narrowing is active, a header appears at the top of the dropdown: "Suppliers of 'X' (N)" with a "Show all" link. Click "Show all" to drop the filter and choose any vendor; "Filter to category" puts it back. Changing the product's category re-applies its own narrowing. The +New button beside it adds a vendor without losing this form.

⤢

Variant of — product families

"Variant of" links this product as a child of another (a size, colour or grade of the same base item). A variant keeps its own stock and price but sits indented under its parent in the grid, and the parent shows a "(N variants)" tag. Leave it "None" for a standalone product.

⤢

Origin

Origin is the country the goods are made in / shipped from ("Made in…"). It flows onto the order line and the customs paperwork as a default.

HS Code — the customs tariff code

The HS Code is the customs classification for the goods. The field is a live search over the code catalogue — type a number or a description and pick the match (it never loads the whole multi-thousand-row list, so it stays fast). The Manage button beside it opens the HS Codes settings if you need to add or edit codes. This value defaults onto orders and the packing list.

SKU & Barcode must be unique

Every product's SKU and Barcode must be unique, so a scanner read or an exact SKU/name resolves to exactly one product. The Barcode is the VENDOR's identity, typed or SCANNED from their packaging, and may be blank: on the New Product form, scan it and Enter checks it against your products — if it already belongs to one, the form offers to open that product instead of creating a twin; if it is new, the code stays and the form asks a REGISTRY for the rest (a barcode carries no name, spec or dimensions — a registry keyed on it does; see Settings → Barcode Lookup). A found answer fills only the EMPTY fields — name, brand, manufacturer, MPN, spec, description, origin — and shows each value it wrote, so a registry's own error is visible without opening anything. It NEVER touches your PACKING figures: a registry describes one consumer unit, while carton size, gross and net weight and units per carton are yours and drive CBM and freight; those are shown as information and never written, the same treatment as the retail reference price and the registry's own category. The bar under the field says what was filled, from which registry, whether it cost a credit or came from the cache, and what was NOT filled (a field you had already typed is kept; a value longer than its column is refused with its length, never cut). The retail reference price is shown as a hint and never written to your price; a registry image becomes the product photo only when you click it. Not in the registry, or no registry enabled for that prefix — the bar says so and the rest is yours, as before. The SKU is YOURS: leave it blank on create and it is generated from the product's classification under Settings → Lookup values → SKU scheme; type one and yours is kept. Either code, scanned into an order line's product box, picks the product on Enter; and both codes find the line in the search bars of Purchase Orders, Inventory and Shipped Orders.

⤢

Brand, Manufacturer, MPN, Description — and the pack-level barcodes

Four fields a registry knows and you may also type: Brand (on the packaging), Manufacturer (who MAKES it — not your vendor, who is picked further down), MPN (the maker's own part number; a registry's model number fills it when no MPN is given) and Description (long prose — never printed on a sticker, never copied to an order line; the short Specifications line is what the order lines snapshot). On an EXISTING product the barcode field grows a Pack-level barcodes list: the case, inner-pack or pallet code with how many consumer units it holds — a scan of a case code then resolves to the product AND the quantity. One code is one thing across the whole catalogue: a pack code that is some product's consumer barcode, or another product's pack code, is refused with the other product named.

Shipping Dimensions (fold-out)

Click "Shipping Dimensions" to expand it. Here you set Units per Carton, the carton's Length/Width/Height in cm, and Gross/Net weight. From the size the app shows the CBM (cubic metres) per carton, and per total. These defaults flow onto every order line for this product and feed the packing list's cartons, weights and volume.

⤢

Price Tiers (fold-out)

Click "Price Tiers" to expand it. Tiers are quantity price-breaks: a minimum quantity, its price and currency, and an optional date window (from/to). Add as many rows as you need. They let "buy more, pay less" pricing apply automatically instead of being typed by hand each order.

⤢

Print, Audit, and saving

At the bottom of the form: Print produces a one-product detail sheet; Audit shows this product's full change history (who changed what, when); Cancel discards; Save writes your changes. Nothing is saved until you click Save.

Updating many products at once

Tick several rows in the grid and a bulk bar appears above it. Choose a field — Category or Default Vendor — set the value, and Apply writes it to every ticked product in one go. Clear deselects them. It's the quick way to re-file a batch of products under a new category or supplier.

Import from a spreadsheet

Import loads products through the column-mapping dialog. See Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet. The rules that bite here: import is insert-only, so a name that collides is saved as a version ("Name (2)"), while a duplicate SKU or barcode is rejected with a per-row message. Headers from a recent Export and the older short form are both accepted.

Export to a spreadsheet

Export downloads the products you are CURRENTLY LOOKING AT — after your filters and sort, not the whole catalogue. See Introduction → Export to a spreadsheet.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it is the printer button, and it produces a product listing — the one page where charts can be added alongside the table.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the search box and the circular arrow, which on this page only reloads. Report Center has its own section below. The page-specific control is New request, covered further down.

⤢

The stage chips

The chips filter the list by where each request sits in its life. The number on each chip is how many requests are in that stage:

⤢

• Open — being worked on: collecting offers, setting buys, gathering approvals, seeding.
• Closed — done and marked complete (you can still reopen it).
• Cancelled — abandoned.

The filters

Three pickers narrow the list — Customer, Branch, and Employee (the owner) — plus a search box. They combine, so you can zero in on one customer's requests in a couple of clicks.

New request — starting a request

New request opens the form for a fresh request (the tour just opened it). A request always belongs to ONE customer; you pick the customer and the owner, then list the demand lines. The next steps walk through it.

⤢

New request · customer & owner

Pick the Customer (required — every request is for one customer) and the Owner (the sourcing agent). The branch follows the owner automatically. Each picker has a “+ New” to create a customer or employee on the spot without leaving the form.

⤢

New request · the demand lines

Each demand line is one thing the customer wants. Per line you set the product (the same picker as Orders, with “+ New”), a specification, the quantity and units, and a target price with its own currency and rate. When you pick a product its list price and its last purchase price are shown for reference. The product can be left as free text and formalized later. Use “+ Add demand line” for more, then Create.

⤢

Opening a request

Clicking a request opens its detail (the tour just opened one). The strip up top counts the demand lines, suppliers, quotes, approved and ordered lines. Below, each demand line is a card with its own price comparison. The header carries the lifecycle buttons and the Quotation / Seed / Report tools.

The demand lines

Each demand-line card shows the full line — product, specs, needed quantity and units, target price, the product's list price, its last purchase price, category and any notes. Edit or Delete the line from the purple drawer; “+ Add demand line” adds another. Deleting a line removes its supplier quotes too.

⤢

Collecting supplier prices

Under each demand line, “Add a supplier's price” records one supplier's quote for that line — pick the supplier, the unit price with its currency and rate, the quantity they offer, lead time, and (if they offered a different item) a substitute product. Every supplier you quote appears as a row in the line's price table so you can compare them side by side: unit price, the same price converted to your local currency, minimum order (MOQ), the offered quantity, and lead time. A SUBSTITUTE tag flags a different product.

⤢

Buy & approvals

On each price row you decide the deal:

• Buy — how much to purchase from THIS supplier. Split one demand line across several suppliers by setting a Buy on more than one row. Buy can't be below the supplier's MOQ.
• Cust — the customer's approval (you tick it on their behalf until a customer portal exists).
• Admin — the internal approval.

Seed to Orders

“Seed to Orders” turns the ready rows into real purchase Orders. It first shows a preview: one card per supplier, with each line's demand-vs-offered-vs-buy quantities, target-vs-quoted price and the difference, a coverage roll-up, the cheapest quote flagged, and lead-time / MOQ warnings — plus whether each order is brand new or appended to one this request already made for that supplier. Confirm and it creates the orders (grouped by supplier — one order per supplier), seeded as Pending so nothing posts to the ledger until you confirm them in Orders. Seeded rows lock and show the order number they went to.

Quotation PDF & sending to the customer

Quotation PDF opens a printable quotation — your company letterhead, the request details, and per item the supplier options with prices and the lines you recommend highlighted. Send to customer emails that same PDF (confirm or correct the address first). This is how the customer reviews and approves before you seed.

Closing & clearing stale quotes

When Open, the header offers Close (mark it done — it highlights once everything you selected is seeded), Cancel (abandon it), and Clear stale quotes (delete the losing supplier quotes that were never chosen). A Closed or Cancelled request is locked — Reopen it to make changes again.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. This page has both levels: on the toolbar it reports the filtered LIST of requests; inside a request it reports THAT REQUEST as a full offer comparison — every demand line with its suppliers, prices and terms.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Export CSV has its own section below, and Report Center is the standard builder. What is specific to this page:

⤢

• Cards / Table — the card view here is picture-led, showing the product image per line.
• Shipping and Packing list — jumps to the Packing page AND carries your current filters with you, so you land on the same set of lines.
• New Order — starts a purchase order. Import CSV is not on this row; it lives inside the order (see Import from a spreadsheet).

The status chips

The coloured pills — All, Pending, Confirmed, Part Rcv (part received), Part Prepped (part prepared), Received, Ready to Ship — filter the list to orders at that stage. The number in each pill tells you how many orders are at that stage right now, so you can see your workload at a glance. Click one to show only those; click All to show everything.

The filter dropdowns

Below the status chips are seven dropdowns — Branch, Currency, Employee, Customer, Vendor, Warehouse and Cargo Type. Pick a value in any of them to narrow the list.

They work together: choosing a customer, for example, shrinks the other dropdowns to only the values that actually appear in that customer's orders — so you can't pick a combination that shows nothing.

⤢

The totals bar

The strip between the filters and the list adds up what you're currently looking at — quantities and money, broken down per currency plus a single total in your local currency. It always reflects your filters, so narrow the list and the totals follow.

⤢

The order list

The main grid shows one row per order line. Click a column header to sort by it. Click a row to open that order in detail.

Use the Cards / Table button (top right) to switch layouts — the table is dense and good for scanning; cards are roomier and show more per order at a glance.

⤢

Creating a new order

Click New Order to open the create form. The next steps of this tour walk you through filling it in — who the order is for, the product lines, and saving.

⤢

The order header — who it's for and by

The top of the New Order form sets the order's context:

⤢

• Customer — who you're buying these goods for.
• Vendor — the supplier you're buying from.
• Status — start it Pending, or Confirmed if it's already agreed.
• Employee — who's responsible (admins can assign it to someone else; otherwise it's you).
• Order Date — defaults to today.
• Delivery Dates — a read-only summary here; you set the real date per line, further down.
• Branch — fills in automatically from the assigned employee's home branch. To change it, re-assign the order to someone in another branch (this keeps the books straight).

Line columns — Product & Spec

Now the line columns, left to right. In the Product cell, start typing to search your whole catalogue by name, SKU, barcode or category; pick a result and the line fills in automatically — price, dimensions, weights, units, origin, and the product's SKU and barcode. A barcode scanner works here too. The Spec column beside it holds the specification text for that product.

⤢

Quantity & Units

Quantity is how many you're ordering. Units is the unit of measure (Pcs, Box, Set…) — it comes from the product but you can change it on the line.

⤢

Price, Currency, Rate → Amount & Local Amount

Price is the unit price, in the line's Currency. Rate is that currency's exchange rate to your local (books) currency.

Amount = Quantity × Price (in the line's currency). Local Amount converts that into your local currency using the Rate. Amount and Local Amount are worked out for you — you never type them.

⤢

Warehouse & Cargo type

Warehouse is where the goods are planned to go — while the order is still Pending or Confirmed you can list one or more; after that it's kept in step with the actual receive/ship movements. Cargo type classifies the shipment (by transport mode, etc.) and is used later to group the Packing list.

⤢

Cartons — Units/Carton, CTNs, CBM

Units/Carton (U/CTN) is how many pieces fit in one carton. From that and the quantity, the app computes CTNs (how many cartons) and, with the dimensions, CBM (total volume in cubic metres). CTNs and CBM are calculated — you only set Units/Carton and the box size.

⤢

Dimensions — L · W · H

The carton's Length, Width and Height in centimetres. They feed the CBM (volume) figure and the carton labels. They default from the product; set them on the line if this order's packing differs.

⤢

Weights — Gross & Net

GW is the gross weight per carton (goods + packaging); NW is the net weight (goods only). The totals bar adds these up across all lines for the whole order.

Labels — Product Label & Imported By

Product Label is the product name as it should print on the cartons and shipping documents (sometimes different from the catalogue name). Imported By names who the goods are imported by (defaults from the customer). Both appear on carton labels and paperwork.

Origin (and HS code)

Origin is the country the goods are made in / shipped from. Together with the HS tariff code carried from the product, it drives customs paperwork. It defaults from the product.

Scan a carton

The toolbar's Scan box reads the carton code printed on every sticker (the last symbol on the label) and LANDS on the box's line: the order opens with that line highlighted, and the box says what the carton is right now — waiting to be received, received where and when, shipped under which SO# (then it hands you over to Shipped Orders), or voided because its line was reverted. It locates; it never posts.

SKU & Barcode

SKU and Barcode are snapshots copied from the product the moment you pick it — so the order records exactly what was ordered even if the product master is edited later. They also print on labels and let a scanner find the line.

Delivery date (per line)

The date this line is expected to be delivered. Each line has its own; the header shows a summary of all of them. The date is colour-coded by urgency — green = comfortable time, amber = due, red = overdue — so tight lines stand out.

Import lines from a spreadsheet

Importing on this page means importing LINES INTO an order, so the button is not in the top toolbar — it is inside the New Order form next to Add Line, and again inside an existing order's detail view. In a new order it fills the draft's lines; in an existing one it adds lines onto it. See Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet.

⤢

Add Line, Import, and saving

Under the line table: "Add Line" adds another blank product row; "Import CSV" bulk-fills the lines from a spreadsheet; "Cancel" throws the draft away; "Create Order" saves it. Nothing is saved until you click Create Order.

Opening and editing an order

Click any order to open its detail panel. There you can edit the lines, add more lines, and record progress. Most cells edit in place — click, change, and it saves. To close, click the order's header again or press Escape.

⤢

Receiving and shipping goods

As goods arrive or leave, use the Rcv (receive) and Shp (ship) buttons on a line. A small panel slides in with the quantity already set to what the line can still take and the warehouse picked; before you confirm it shows a live preview — green if it's fine, red if there's a problem (for example, trying to ship more than a warehouse holds) — so you can't accidentally oversell.

The line's status moves along on its own from the quantities: once everything's received it becomes Received, and once it's ready to leave, Ready to Ship.

Receiving by cartons — which boxes

A receive is made of boxes, and the drawer's Cartons button says which: a dialog lists the line's cartons in sticker order — tick them, take All or the First N, or scan the stickers (the dialog's own scan box checks the matching row). The quantity then FOLLOWS the selection (3 boxes of 200 read 600 and the field is locked until you clear the boxes), and the warehouse is a property of each box: set Receiving into, tick or scan, switch warehouses and continue — a line split across WH-1 and WH-2 posts one movement per warehouse, each with its boxes. The selection is gated by the allowed quantity: a box that would exceed it is refused on its own row.

Warehouses

A warehouse isn't fixed for a whole order — it's chosen at each receive or each ship, because goods can land in or leave from different places. While an order is still Pending or Confirmed you can note the planned warehouse(s); after that, the page keeps the warehouse list up to date automatically from the actual movements you record.

Doing many lines at once

Inside an open order you can tick several lines and apply the same action to all of them together — for example, receive or ship a whole batch in one go instead of line by line. A preview shows what will happen before you confirm: for a receive or a ship every row names its warehouse (the line's first planned one unless you change it), and a bulk receive has a Cartons of this delivery button — one dialog for every line at once, grouped by line, with a scan box on top: boxes come off the truck mixed, you scan what is in hand and the right line's counter climbs; tick or take the First N for unscanned stacks; each line is capped by its delta, and a line's delta follows its boxes.

Carton labels — where to start

Still inside the open order: every line has a "Labels" button (a printer icon, or a count like "6 CTN" once labels exist). Click it to open the Carton Label Designer for that line's cartons. If the line has no labels yet, the app first works them out from the line's Quantity and Units/Carton, then opens the designer.

The label designer — the settings panel

The strip down the left of the designer is where you shape the labels — font, border, how many fit on a page, margins, paper size, and the barcode/cut-mark toggles. Everything you change updates the preview on the right instantly. Nothing is committed until you print, so try things freely.

Presets — a one-click starting point

The preset buttons (Shipping Label, Small Sticker, Single Full Page, Thermal Printer) load a whole set of sensible settings at once — font, size, border, how many labels per page, margins and paper. Pick the one closest to what you want, then fine-tune. Choosing a preset also jumps you back to page 1.

Font & text

Set the typeface (a monospace font like Courier keeps columns aligned and is the safest for labels), the font size in points, the line spacing, and the weight (how bold). Above weight 900 the app adds an extra stroke to make the text even heavier for low-quality printers. You can also switch the text to italic.

Label box & border

"Label Padding" is the breathing space inside each label between the border and the text. "Border Style" draws a line around every label — solid, dashed, or none — and when it's on, "Border Width" sets how thick that line is. Dashed borders double as a cut guide when you print many labels per sheet.

Labels per page & per row

"Labels / Page" is how many labels print on one sheet; "Labels / Row" is how many sit side by side before wrapping to the next line. H-Spacing and V-Spacing are the gaps (in millimetres) between labels across and down. Together these turn one design into a full sheet of repeated labels.

Page margins

The blank border around the whole sheet — top, bottom, left and right, in millimetres. Increase them if your printer clips the edges, or shrink them to fit more on the page.

Paper size & orientation

Choose A4, Letter, or Custom. For Custom you type the exact width and height in millimetres — use this for label rolls or a thermal printer. Orientation flips the sheet between portrait (tall) and landscape (wide).

The three code lines

Every sticker carries up to three scannable Code 128 symbols, each captioned so you know what a scan will mean and each placed under the text line it belongs to — SKU under Item, Carton code under CTN No., Barcode last after Made in — and each blank when the fact behind it does not exist: the VENDOR barcode (their EAN/UPC, typed from the packaging — theirs), the SKU (yours — what the product is, generated from the product's classification), and the CARTON CODE (yours — which box, for life: minted the moment the line is confirmed and never reused). The CTN No. text line stays exactly as before; the carton code is its scannable twin, not its replacement.

Cut marks & barcode

"Show cut marks" adds small corner guides at each label's edges so you know exactly where to cut a full sheet. "Show barcode" toggles the barcode line (the product barcode, printed as the last line of each label) — turn it off for a cleaner text-only label.

Zoom the preview

Zoom in or out to inspect the label closely or see the whole sheet at once. This only changes how big the preview looks on your screen — it does NOT change the printed size, which always follows the paper and label settings. "Fit" resets the zoom to 100%.

The preview — and editing the text

The white sheet is an exact preview of what will print. Click any line of text on a label to edit it right there — handy for a quick correction before printing. Your edits apply to this print session.

⤢

Print this page or all pages

"Page" prints just the sheet you're looking at; "All" prints every page of labels for this line (the number in brackets is how many pages). Both open your browser's normal print dialog, where you pick the printer and confirm. The printout uses your exact settings — paper, margins, borders and barcode.

Move between label pages

When a line has more cartons than fit on one sheet, the labels spread across several pages. Use First / Prev / Next / Last at the bottom of the designer to step through them and check each page before printing. Close the designer (the ✕) to return to the order.

Delivery dates and the colours

Each line can carry its own delivery date. The date shows a colour by how close it is — green when there's comfortable time, amber when it's getting near, red when it's due or overdue — so urgent orders stand out. Lines already received or ready to ship don't show a dot, since the date no longer matters for them.

Export to a spreadsheet

The Export CSV button in the top toolbar downloads the orders you are CURRENTLY LOOKING AT — after your filters, not every order. See Introduction → Export to a spreadsheet.

⤢

Printing and Report Center

Report Center (the top button) is where you print and export. You choose which columns to include and whether to print exactly what's on screen or a wider set, then print or save it.

Handing off to Packing

When orders are ready to ship, the "Shipping and Packing list" button takes you to the Packing page and carries your current filters across as a starting scope — so you continue with the same set of orders you were just looking at.

Re-packing this order

The Re-packing button on an open order raises a request to correct a packing or quantity mistake on it — how many per carton, how many in total, which product. It is a request, not an edit: it travels an approval chain first, and only a posted request changes the order. The button opens the Check Reports page's Re-packing slot with this order already chosen, so you only tick the lines. Check Reports → Re-packing explains the cases, the claim and the lifecycle in full.

Scan a carton into the container

As each box goes in, scan its carton code (the last symbol on the sticker). The box answers in place — "loaded, 2 of 3 on line #1001/3" — and the CTN column's chip climbs until every carton of the line is in. A carton must have been RECEIVED first; one that was never received, one already shipped, or one voided by a revert is refused, and the box says which.

Shipping the ready goods — the main job

The teal "Migrate Shipped Orders" button is the heart of this page. When lines are Ready to Ship, this is how they leave the system as one cargo. In one confirmed action the app does four things: the lines are archived to the Shipped Orders page, every money movement that belonged to them is remapped to the new shipped order, the service fee is calculated from your fee rules and posted, and all the related accounts are updated.

The number on the button tells you how many Ready-to-Ship lines are waiting. The next steps of this tour open the panel and walk it control by control.

⤢

The shipping panel

This panel is a checklist, not a trigger: you describe the cargo, choose what goes in it, run a safe Check, review the preview — and only the final "Migrate Now" button actually ships. You can close it any time with the ✕ (or the Close button) and nothing will have happened.

While the panel is open the whole page switches to shipping mode: the table shows only the Ready-to-Ship lines in your scope, each with a tick-box.

⤢

Cargo Type — the one required choice

Every shipment must carry a Cargo Type (sea, air, land… — whatever types you've defined). It does two jobs: it labels the archived cargo so you can find and group it later, and it's one of the keys used to match the right service-fee rule. The Check button refuses to run until you've picked one.

Narrowing the cargo

The dropdowns beside Cargo Type — Branches, Suppliers, Customers, Employees — narrow which Ready-to-Ship lines go into this cargo. They're smart: each one only offers values that actually appear in the Ready-to-Ship lines in front of you, so you can't pick an empty combination.

Changing any filter resets the Check — the preview you saw no longer matches what's selected, so you simply run Check again.

⤢

Ticking the exact lines

In shipping mode every Ready-to-Ship line in the table gets a tick-box — this is the finest level of control over what ships. Everything starts ticked; untick a line to leave it for the next cargo. The tick-box in the column header selects or clears all visible lines at once.

So you have three levels: the panel filters (broad), the order chips (whole orders), and these tick-boxes (single lines).

⤢

Choosing whole orders — the order chips

The chip bar lists every order in the shipping scope with a count like (3/5) — selected lines out of total. Click a chip to hide that whole order from the table and drop it from this cargo; click again to bring it back. "Show all" restores everything. It's the quick way to say "this container takes orders 12 and 15, but 17 waits for the next one".

⤢

Check — the safe dry-run

Check asks the server to rehearse the whole shipment without changing anything. Two things can come back:

An orange "Issues found" box — a numbered list of what blocks the shipment (for example, a line missing data or quantities that don't add up). Fix them and Check again.

A green "Ready to migrate" box — the preview of exactly what will ship: how many lines and orders, the total value, the branches involved, and the service fee it matched. Run Check as many times as you like; it never costs anything.

The preview & the service fee

The green box is your last look before committing. Beside the counts and total value it shows the matched service-fee rule: your fee rules each carry a priority, a percentage, a minimum fee and a currency — the highest-priority rule that fits this cargo wins. The preview names the rule and shows the percentage and minimum, and you can override the fee currency right there if this cargo should be billed in a different one.

When it all looks right, "Migrate Now" executes the shipment. That click is the only irreversible one on this page.

After shipping — what you get back

When the migration finishes, a blue summary reports everything that happened: the new Shipped Order ID (the archived cargo's number), how many lines and which orders were migrated, how many money transactions were remapped onto it, the service fees actually posted, and the list of affected accounts — worth a review by your finance side, since balances moved.

From here on, the cargo lives on the Archived Orders page: the working Orders list stays lean, and the full history — lines, documents, fees — is preserved under that one shipped order.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the search box and the circular arrow — which on this page is Refresh, reloading without clearing anything. What is specific to Shipping & Packing:

⤢

• Back to Orders — on the left, beside the page name, returning you to the order you came from.
• Auto Seq — numbers every visible line 1, 2, 3… in one go (more below).
• Reset Seq — clears the numbering on every visible line (more below).
• Report Center — here it prints the packing list document itself, not a listing of rows.

The status chips

Same idea as on the Orders page: the coloured pills filter the list to lines at that stage, and the number in each pill is how many are there right now. For shipping you'll mostly live in Received and Ready to Ship — but every stage is available, so you can plan a container before the goods have even arrived.

The cargo totals

The cards add up what you're currently looking at: how many lines, total quantity, how much is received and shipped, total cartons, gross and net weight in kilograms, and CBM (the total volume in cubic metres). This is your loading maths — narrow the list to one cargo and you can read its weight and volume straight off the cards, before the truck arrives.

The lines table

One row per order line, with everything the warehouse needs side by side. The table is wider than the screen — scroll sideways for the far columns — and every column header sorts when you click it:

⤢

• Seq — the load sequence (next step of this tour).
• Order / Ser — which order the line belongs to and its line number.
• Customer, Vendor, Product Name, Spec — who and what.
• Qty / Rcvd / Shpd — ordered, received so far, shipped so far.
• U/CTN and CTN — pieces per carton, and how many cartons that makes.
• Carton No. — the carton numbering for the boxes (explained shortly).
• L×W×H, G.W., N.W. — carton size and weights, feeding the totals above.
• HS Code, SKU, Barcode — customs code and product identifiers.
• Status — the line's current stage.

Load sequence — planning the container

The Seq column is the order the cartons go into the truck or container: 1 loads first, 2 next, and so on. Plan it so what must come OUT first goes IN last.

Type a number in any line's Seq box and press Enter (or click away) to save it. If the number is already taken, the other lines shift to make room — you never get two lines fighting over the same position. Click the Seq column header to sort by it and read your loading plan top to bottom.

Auto Seq — number everything in one click

Auto Seq numbers every visible line 1, 2, 3… in one go. So: filter the table down to the cargo you're loading, then click Auto Seq and the plan writes itself. You can still fine-tune individual lines by hand afterwards.

Reset Seq — start over

Reset Seq clears the numbering (back to blank) on every visible line, after asking you to confirm. Use it when the plan changed and you'd rather renumber from scratch than fix lines one by one. Any manual numbering on those lines is lost — that's the point — so read the confirmation before you agree.

Carton No. — how the boxes get named

The Carton No. column builds a carton numbering for each line automatically: the vendor's initials, the customer's initials, the product's number, then the carton range — for example GT-AC-102-1~5 means five cartons of product 102, from vendor G.T. for customer A.C. The same numbering appears on the printed packing list, so the warehouse can tie every physical box back to its line.

HS Code — editable right here

The HS Code is the customs tariff code for the goods. It usually comes from the product, but you can set or correct it right in the table: click the HS Code cell and search the code catalogue by number or description. Preparing the shipment is exactly the moment you'd catch a missing one — the printed packing list and customs paperwork use this value.

Printing the packing list

Report Center prints the packing list document: sequence, product, quantities, cartons, carton numbers, sizes, weights, CBM, HS codes and barcodes — with totals. You choose which columns to include, then print or save it. The list follows your current filters and sort, so what you arranged on screen is what lands on paper.

⤢

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Report Center and Include closed periods each have their own section below. What is specific to Shipped Orders:

⤢

• Cards / Table — the card view here is one card per shipment.
• Include closed periods — on this page it brings sealed fiscal-year SHIPMENTS into view.

The filters

Narrow the shipments by Branch, Currency, Employee, Customer, Vendor and Warehouse. They cross-narrow: picking one shrinks the others to only the values that still yield a matching shipment, so you can't build an empty combination.

Cargo type chips

Filter to a single cargo type (sea / air / land / …) — the type each shipment was migrated under. Each chip carries its own colour and a count; "All" clears it.

⤢

The totals banner

Sums the shipments you're currently looking at (after your filters), broken down per currency. Your at-a-glance "how much has shipped" read for the current scope.

The shipment grid

One row per shipment (SO#): the cargo type and date, the customers and vendors on it, the roll-up metrics (quantity, weight, value…), a documents-status chip, and the branches. Click any row to open its detail panel.

⤢

Opening a shipment

Clicking a row opens the shipment's detail panel (the tour just did it). At the top is a totals banner for THIS one shipment; below it a drill-down with four tabs — the next steps walk each. Click the panel header (or the fold arrow) to close it.

⤢

The four drill-down tabs

The segmented bar switches what you're looking at inside the shipment: Lines, Shipment Expenses, Transactions, and Shipments Docs. Clicking the active tab again folds its body without closing the panel.

⤢

Tab — Lines (every column)

Every product line that shipped — a frozen snapshot of exactly what left, as it was at ship time. Column by column:

⤢

• Ser — the line's serial number within the shipment.
• Customer / Vendor — who the goods are for, and who supplied them.
• Product / Spec — the product name and its specification text.
• Qty / Units — how many, and the unit of measure.
• Price — the unit price, in the Cur (currency) shown beside it.
• Rate — that currency's exchange rate to your books currency, locked at ship time.
• Raw Amount — Qty × Price in the line's OWN currency. Amount — that converted to your local currency (Raw × Rate); this is the figure that hits the books.
• U/CTN · L×W×H · GW · CBM — units per carton, carton dimensions, gross weight, volume.
• HS Code · SKU · Barcode · Origin — the customs code and the product identifiers.
• WH / Branch — the warehouse it shipped from and the owning branch.
• Delivery / Employee — the delivery date and who handled the line.

Expenses — one statement per customer

The Shipment Expenses tab lays the customer charges out as one STATEMENT card per customer (and branch). The card header carries the identity — customer, branch, currency (or "multi-cur") — and three running totals in your local currency: Total (everything charged here), Paid (already received), and Outstanding (Total − Paid, shown RED until it reaches zero). The next steps highlight each control on the card.

⤢

Expenses — the Print button

The highlighted Print button opens the formatted "Shipment Statement" — a company-header document listing this customer's shipped lines, the Service fees, the Shipping, and the Total / Paid / Outstanding — ready to print or hand over.

⤢

Expenses — the Send button

The highlighted Send button emails that same statement straight to the customer. It's greyed out and disabled when the customer has no email address on file — add one on their Customer record to enable it.

⤢

Expenses — Service Fees & Shipping

Each card breaks into two tables. SERVICE FEES is your own handling charge; SHIPPING is the freight and surcharges you re-billed (surcharge lines carry a badge). Both share the same columns — item · Share (the % applied) · Amount raw (its own currency) · Amount (local) — with a grey sub-row naming the fee RULE and notes behind each line, and a subtotal. The two subtotals make up the header Total.

⤢

Expenses — "Show GL detail"

The tour has expanded the "Show GL detail" fold-out for you: it reveals the raw double-entry ledger postings behind the whole statement — the debit/credit rows that actually hit the books, read exactly like the Transactions tab. The "N tx" badge counts them; click it any time to hide the detail again.

Tab — Transactions (the double-entry, field by field)

The raw accounting for this shipment — every general-ledger transaction as a DOUBLE ENTRY: a debit and an equal credit on the same row. Field by field:

• TX# · Date · Type · Description — which posting, when, what kind, and its narrative.
• Ser — the shipment line the entry relates to.
• The DEBIT side: DR Acc (account number), DR Name (account name), Raw DR (amount in its own currency), Dr Cur, Dr Rate (its exchange rate), Local DR (converted to your books currency).
• The CREDIT side: the same six fields — CR Acc, CR Name, Raw CR, Cr Cur, Cr Rate, Local CR.
• Branch — which branch the entry belongs to.

Scan a carton that came back

The toolbar's Scan box is the post-shipment trace: scan the sticker on a returned or disputed box and the page opens the shipment it left under, its Cartons tab, and that carton's row. See [[archived:t-cartons|Cartons — the trace]] for what the row holds.

Cartons — the trace

Every handling unit sealed under this shipment, in line-then-sticker order: its carton code, the CTN No. printed beside it, quantity, the warehouse and date it was received into (warehouses in their own colours, counted per warehouse in the tab's header), loaded on, and the date the shipment left — with the Report Center for this tab. This is the record a return or a dispute needs months later — scan the sticker on a box that comes back in the toolbar's Scan box and the page opens the shipment it left under, this tab, and that carton's row (amber, scrolled into view), whatever happened to the order number since; a shipment outside the loaded list is fetched by its number with closed periods included. A carton that has not shipped is answered in the box — it is still a line on Purchase Orders — and the same scan on Purchase Orders hands a shipped carton over here.

Docs — the status banner

The Shipments Docs tab is a full document control panel, not just a file list. The banner at the top shows the document Owner, a completion status, an L/C-required flag, and expiry counters — how many files are expiring soon (≤30 days) or already expired — plus a total file count.

Docs — the missing-docs strip

On the banner's counter row, a "Missing N" strip lists every document type that's EXPECTED for this shipment but hasn't been uploaded yet, each as a colour-coded chip. It's the at-a-glance checklist of what's still needed before the shipment is document-complete.

Docs — files by category

Uploaded files are grouped into colour-coded, collapsible category sections — Commercial, Transport, Origin, Inspection, Treatment, Customs, Financial, Photos, Logistics and Other. Recommended-preset types are gold-starred, expected ones carry an EXPECTED tag.

Docs — the per-file actions

The highlighted buttons sit on every file row. The eye 👁 previews the file (images open inline in a lightbox; PDF/Office prompt to download), the download ⬇ saves it to disk, and Manage opens the Manage Docs drawer focused on that file to edit its metadata, replace or delete it.

Docs — the Configure button

The highlighted Configure button opens the document-set settings drawer. It can be opened even before any file is uploaded — it's where an admin defines what this shipment SHOULD carry. The next steps open it and walk each setting inside.

Configure — Owner

Inside the Configure drawer, the first field is Owner. The owner governs who may edit or delete every file under this shipment (alongside logistics/admin rights). Admins can reassign it from the dropdown; everyone else sees it read-only.

Configure — L/C required

The "L/C required" checkbox marks this shipment as governed by a Letter of Credit. When ticked, the system alerts if L/C documents are missing — this is what feeds the Dashboard's "L/C Docs Missing" alert.

Configure — Completion status

Completion status works two ways. Leave the Expected list (next step) empty and you're in MANUAL mode — you pick Incomplete / Partial / Complete / N-A yourself. Add anything to Expected and it flips to AUTO mode — the status is computed from what's missing or expired, and this dropdown locks.

Configure — Expected documents

The heart of the drawer: pick, by category, exactly which document types this shipment SHOULD carry. Anything expected but not uploaded shows in the ⚠ missing strip up top; while this list is non-empty it also drives the completion status automatically. This one list powers the missing-docs alerts everywhere in the app.

Configure — Overall notes

A free-text notes field for the whole document set — anything the team should know about this shipment's paperwork. Save at the bottom writes every setting; closing the drawer without saving discards changes.

Docs — the Manage Docs button

The highlighted Manage Docs button opens the one drawer where all file work happens — upload, edit metadata, replace, delete — and everything auto-saves. The next two steps open it and show its two panes.

Manage Docs — the type list

The left rail of the Manage drawer lists every document type, grouped by category, with a search box on top. Badges tell the story at a glance: ✓N already uploaded, +N queued, and a red "!" for an expected type with nothing uploaded. Recommended-corridor types are gold-starred. Clicking a type opens its panel on the right — the tour has picked one for you.

Manage Docs — the type panel

The right pane only appears once you pick a type. It opens with a header showing the type's code and name, a gold star if it's a recommended-corridor type, and an EXPECTED tag if it's on this shipment's expected list. Everything below acts on THIS type.

Manage Docs — an uploaded file

Each file already on this type gets its own card: the filename and size, view 👁 / download ⬇ / delete 🗑 buttons, and inline metadata fields — doc number, issue & expiry dates (with a live expiry countdown), issuer, notes. Edit any field and it saves on blur; there's no Save button. Delete removes the file immediately.

Manage Docs — add a file

At the bottom, the "Add another file" slot: drop a file or click to choose. It reads the filename to auto-detect and pre-fill fields (you'll see an "auto" hint). You can set the doc number, an issue date (Today shortcut), an expiry date (+30d / +90d / +1y shortcuts with a live countdown), the issuer, a B/L type for transport docs, a "wet-ink original on file" flag, and notes. Dropping the file uploads it instantly — no separate Upload button, and the footer confirms it auto-saves on every change.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it produces a shipped-cargo report from the shipment list, carrying your current filters.

Re-packing a shipment

The Re-packing button on an open shipment raises a request to correct a packing or quantity mistake on goods that have already sailed. It is a request, not an edit — it travels an approval chain, and correcting a shipment reaches further than correcting a live order: the archived line, its stock movements, the box registry and the accounts that followed from them. Check Reports → Re-packing explains the cases, the claim and the lifecycle in full.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Report Center and Include closed periods each have their own section below. What is specific to Inventory:

⤢

• Warehouse / Branch / Currency / Product filters — covered next.
• Cards / Table — the card view here is one card per shipment rather than per row.

Scan a carton — where is this box?

The toolbar's Scan box reads a carton code and lands on the box's stock row: the line in the warehouse that holds it, opened with its movement history. A carton received into WH-2 opens the WH-2 row of its line, not the first row of the serial; a shipped carton resolves to its shipment's row under the cleared lifecycle; a carton not yet received has no stock row, so the line's order group opens and the box says why. Any filter that hides the row — lifecycle, warehouse, branch, currency, product — is cleared first so the row can appear.

Cartons — which boxes are here

Under a line's movement history sits its Cartons list, the same columns as the Shipped Orders trace: code, CTN No., quantity, received on, loaded on, shipped on. Like the movements above it, the list is THIS WAREHOUSE's — the row you opened is one line in one warehouse, and an in/out history only makes sense inside one — so the header reads the count and the warehouse; a box you scanned is amber. The list has its own Report Center. A cleared line shows the shipment's boxes for this line in this warehouse.

The filters

Four ways to narrow the grid: by Warehouse (where the stock sits), by Branch (who owns it), by Currency, and by Product. The Product filter is a search picker — type a name, SKU, barcode or category and pick to see only that product's stock across every warehouse. Filters combine, and the metrics strip re-totals to match.

Include closed periods

By default the grid hides refs from sealed (closed) fiscal years — but your current on-hand stock always shows regardless. Admins get this toggle to bring the sealed-year refs and their movements back into view for audit or research, then hide them again.

In Stock vs Cleared — the lifecycle (important)

This is the part people find confusing, so here it is plainly. An inventory line stays tied to its live order until that order has FULLY shipped; only then is it "cleared" and archived. The three chips filter by that lifecycle:

⤢

• All — every line, active and cleared.
• In Stock — lines still tied to a live order. These hold your current on-hand balance. (A line can even sit at 0 for a moment and still count as In Stock — it stays active until its whole order ships.)
• Cleared — lines whose order has fully shipped. They're archived, their balance is always 0, and they're kept purely for history.

The metrics strip — how to read it

The strip of cards up top. Every card sums whatever is currently visible (after your filters and the In-Stock/Cleared chip). On most cards you get TWO numbers: the big one is the CURRENT balance across those rows; the small "+in / −out" line below is the LIFETIME movement — everything ever received versus everything ever shipped. The next steps take each card.

Card — Lines

How many inventory lines you're looking at right now. (In the Cleared view this flips to "Orders" — how many distinct shipped orders.) It's your headline "how much am I looking at" number, and it moves as you filter.

⤢

Card — Products

How many DISTINCT products appear across the visible lines — so five lines of the same product count as one product here. A quick read on variety versus volume.

⤢

Card — Qty

The current stock quantity on hand across the visible rows. The green +in / red −out below is the lifetime: everything ever received versus everything ever shipped for those rows. Current qty is essentially (in − out).

⤢

Card — Value

The worth of the stock on hand, converted to your LOCAL currency (Finance access only) — quantity × price × rate. The breakdown below is per-currency lifetime in/out in the original amounts, so you can read the money in each currency on its own line.

⤢

Card — CTN (cartons)

Total cartons on hand, worked out from quantity ÷ units-per-carton (rounded up). The in/out below is the lifetime cartons moved. This is what the warehouse and the truck actually handle.

⤢

Card — GW (gross weight)

Total gross weight in kilograms across the visible stock (per-carton weight × cartons), with lifetime weight moved below. Your shipping-weight figure at a glance.

⤢

Card — CBM (volume)

Total volume in cubic metres (length × width × height × cartons), with lifetime volume moved below. This is your "how much container space does this take" number — the key figure for planning a shipment.

⤢

Card — Vendors

How many distinct suppliers (the SOURCE of the goods) appear across the visible rows.

Card — Customers

How many distinct customers (the DESTINATION the goods are for) appear across the visible rows.

Card — WH (warehouses)

How many distinct warehouses the visible stock is spread across — useful when you're deciding where to consolidate.

Card — Branches

How many distinct branches own the visible rows. Narrows to one when you set the Branch filter.

Layer 1 — the grid (one row per order / shipment)

The main grid is the TOP of the drill-down — one row per order or shipment (Order# for a live order, SO# for a shipped one). Each row summarises that ref's lines across its columns:

• Ref# and Date — which order/shipment, and when it was created.
• Branches · Status · Customers · Vendors · Employee — the who and the current stage.
• Warehouses · Cargo · Cur — where it's stored, the cargo type, the currency.
• Lines · Qty · CBM · GW · Local — the roll-ups: how many product lines, total quantity, volume, weight, and the value in your local currency.

Layer 2 — the line-items inside a ref

Clicking a row opens the products INSIDE that order/shipment — the dense per-line view (the tour just did it). It's the detailed level: one row per product line, with the product name pinned on the left as you scroll sideways. For each line you get:

• Product name + Specification — what it is.
• Quantity ON HAND now, Units, and Units-per-carton.
• Cartons, Dimensions (L×W×H), Gross / Net weight, CBM.
• Price, Currency and Local value; Origin and HS code.
• Status and the relevant dates.

Layer 3 — a line's full movement history

Clicking a line opens its complete traceability — every stock MOVEMENT for that one product line (the tour opened it). This is the bottom of the pyramid, the "where did my stock go?" answer. Each movement row shows:

• When it happened (time-stamped, pinned on the left).
• The action — Receive, Ship, partial Ship, or Return.
• The quantity moved (+ received / − shipped) and the warehouse.
• The reference document behind it, and the running balance after that movement.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it produces a stock report from the inventory grid, carrying whatever warehouse, branch, currency and product filters you have set.

⤢

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. What is specific to Check Reports:

⤢

• Search — matches every column of the report row: title, who checked it, status, branch, date, notes.
• Cards / Table — the card view here is one card per report.
• Report Center — here it prints the filtered LIST of reports; a single report prints from inside itself.
• New Report — starts an inspection, covered below.

The stage chips

The coloured chips filter the list by where each report sits in its life. The number on each chip is how many reports are in that stage right now:

⤢

• Draft — being worked on; fully editable.
• Submitted — sent to a manager and waiting on their decision; edits are paused.
• Approved — the manager approved it; it can now be closed.
• Rejected — the manager sent it back with a reason; edit and re-submit.
• Closed — final and locked; read-only forever.

The filters

Seven pickers narrow the list — Branch, Customer, Vendor, Warehouse, Cargo, Currency, and Employee. They read from the orders behind each report's lines, so filtering by (say) a customer shows only reports that touch that customer's goods. They combine, and each picker only offers values that still make sense given the others you've set.

New Report — starting an inspection

New Report opens the line picker — a dedicated screen for choosing exactly which order lines the report will cover (the tour just opened it). It lists the lines of your LIVE orders (the goods you can inspect right now). The next steps walk through it.

⤢

New Report · order-status chips

Across the top of the picker, one chip per order status (Pending, Confirmed, Part_Rcv, Received, Part_Prepped, Ready_to_Ship) with a live count. Click one to show only lines whose order is at that status — e.g. Received — so you inspect the right stage; click it again to clear.

⤢

New Report · the filters

The same seven cross-narrowing pickers as the list — Branch, Customer, Vendor, Warehouse, Cargo, Currency, Employee — plus a line search box. Each picker only offers values still valid given the others you've set, so you can zero in on one shipment in a couple of clicks.

⤢

New Report · picking and creating

The action strip runs the selection:

⤢

• Lines match — a live count of the lines your filters + chips currently show.
• Hide already-checked — on by default; hides lines already sitting in another report so you can't double-check them.
• Select all — tick every selectable line currently shown.
• Create — builds the report from your ticked lines and opens it; the number on the button is how many you've picked.

New Report · the line list

Each row is one live order line — a checkbox, the order reference, the product, quantity, order status, warehouse and vendor. Tick the lines to inspect. Lines already in another report are greyed out and labelled with that report's number, so the same line is never checked twice.

⤢

Opening a report

Click any report to open it (the tour just did). The detail view is the working surface: a header with the report's stage, the approval controls, and every inspected line with its verdict, notes, and photos. The next steps walk through it.

The approval workflow (important)

This strip drives the report's life. The rule is simple: a report is editable until it is CLOSED. The flow is edit → submit for approval → the manager approves or rejects → close.

• Submit for approval — hands the report to the assigned manager and pauses editing. Unchecked lines are dropped at submit.
• Recall — pull a submitted report back to edit it, as long as the manager hasn't acted yet.
• Approved / Rejected — the manager decides from the Action Center. A rejection comes back with a reason; fix it and submit again.
• Report Closing — once approved, closing locks the report permanently (read-only).

The inspection lines — the verdict

Each row is one order line being checked (the tour is on the first one). It shows the order reference and line, the order's current status, and the product — and on the right, the VERDICT toggle: click Matched or Different. Lines marked Different get a red edge so exceptions stand out.

Re-packing — the second workflow on this page

The toggle at the top left switches this page between two workflows that share its chrome. Check Reports records what an inspection FOUND. Re-packing records a packing or quantity mistake that someone wants CORRECTED, and walks it through the same approval chain. It is here because the mistake is usually found during an inspection, by the same people. Only an ORD or LOG admin sees the toggle.

• A request names one order (live) or one shipment (already sailed), the lines affected, and what each of them should say instead.
• It goes to the approver in the Action Center, exactly like a submitted report.
• Approval LICENSES the correction — it does not perform it. Nothing in the order, the stock or the accounts moves when a request is approved.
• You can also reach this from the order itself: the Re-packing button on an order's detail, or a shipment's, opens a request already pointed at it.

Raising a request

The form asks four things: what happened, which order or shipment, which lines, and why. The cause is required and is read by whoever approves it, so write what a stranger would need — the port call, the recount, the document that disagreed.

• What happened — the case, covered below.
• Target — Live order or Shipped order. This chooses which records the line picker reads; switching it clears anything you already picked, because a live line and a shipped line are different records.
• Lines — opens the picker, covered below.
• FIN admin for the follow-up bill — only fill this in if the correction could move the customer split on a shipment. That person will own the draft bill if one is raised.
• Cause — who asked, and why.

The case — read, never chosen

You do not pick the case. It is what your entries add up to, stated live above the form and restated by the server from the same rule, so it can never disagree with the request it describes. What decides it: a corrected SHIPPED quantity means goods registered as shipped that never left; a corrected quantity or product means the record itself is wrong, and the target says whether the goods have sailed; a packing-only change is a rearrangement. After a shipped correction is posted, one that moved the customer split is recorded as a rates change — because that is what it turned out to be.

• Rearrangement — the boxes were re-packed, the totals did not change. No billing consequence.
• Rates change — the re-pack moves how a shipment's cost splits between customers. A follow-up bill will be drafted.
• Goods still here — a line was registered as PREPPED but the goods never left the floor. The prep figure is walked back by a negative prep delta; nothing was posted when it was marked prepped, so nothing is reversed.
• Wrong order, not shipped — the order record itself is wrong and the goods have not sailed.
• Wrong order, already shipped — the wrong record has sailed, so the archived line, the stock movements, the box registry and the accounts all have to be corrected together.
• Nothing above is chosen. Each name is what a rule — the server's, and the same one the form shows you as you type — makes of your entries, so the label on a request can never disagree with what the request does.

Picking the lines, and claiming the change

You never type an order number here. The picker lists the real lines from the records themselves — live orders or shipments, whichever the target says — with a search box and customer and warehouse filters over what is in front of you. Tick the ones the mistake touches.

• One request covers ONE order. The first line you tick locks that order, and the other orders' rows grey out and say so.
• Use selected lines brings them into the request.
• Select all obeys that same rule: it fills from ONE order — the one already ticked, or the first the filters show, named on the button itself — so no single click can build the request the process forbids.
• A line already claimed on this request is not offered again. One record line carries one claim, and the picker says how many it withheld rather than leaving you with a short list and no reason.
• Each line then shows what it says NOW, and an empty box for what it SHOULD say. Fill in units per carton, or quantity, or both.
• A line you picked but did not change is refused — the form says so, and you either fill it in or remove the line.
• The old values are read from the record when the line is entered, not typed by you, so the approver reads a true before-and-after.

From draft to decision

A request moves through the same stages a check report does, and the buttons on it follow the stage. While it is a draft it is entirely yours: the pencil edits the cause, the case and the assigned FIN admin, each line's claim edits in place, and a draft can be deleted outright.

• Submit for approval — sends it to the approver's Action Center inbox and pauses editing.
• Withdraw — takes the SUBMISSION back while it is still waiting on the approver, so you can edit and submit again. It is offered only then, because that is the only time there is a submission to take back; the approver's inbox card is cancelled with it.
• Rejected — comes back with the manager's reason on it. It cannot be deleted; the exchange stays on the record. Reopen, fix, submit again.
• Approved — the correction is licensed but has not happened, and the request says so plainly. Two ways on: post it, or reopen it.
• Post the correction — applies the claim to the records the request names: the order line or the archived line, its stock, its box registry, and whatever the accounts owe. All of its lines land together or none do, and a request whose records moved since it was raised is refused rather than applied to facts nobody approved.
• Reopen — returns an approved or rejected request to Draft so it can be edited and submitted again. The approval is cleared, because it no longer covers what the request says. This is also the way out of a request that can never post, because the records it claims against have moved for good.
• Posted — done. A further correction to the same records is a NEW request.
• Selecting in bulk: on the list, only Drafts carry a tick box, because deleting is the only thing that is safe to do to many requests at once — posting a correction and withdrawing a submission are decisions you make on one request at a time. Inside a Draft, the lines carry their own tick boxes and their own Delete, so a request built from a large pick can be trimmed without removing one line at a time.

Scan a carton — the boxes you opened

The Scan box above the lines reads a carton code and lands on that line's card: the card turns amber, scrolls into view, and the carton joins its CARTONS CHECKED row as a chip — the inspected sample, box by box. A line the report does not hold yet is added by the scan itself (that is how lines enter a report on the vendor's floor), as long as no other report already checks it: one check per line, for life, and the box names the report that has it. Click a chip to cycle its verdict — No → Matched → Different — and × to unpin it.

Expected vs Received notes

Under each line sit two note boxes, side by side — Expected (what the order called for) and Received (what actually arrived). Type your observations; they save when you click away. This is where you record the detail behind a Different verdict.

Line photos

Below the notes, attach photos — an Expected set and a Received set, per line. Add uploads an image and a thumbnail appears. Click any thumbnail to view it full-size; when a line has several, step through them with the ‹ › arrows (or the keyboard). These photos ride along into the Report Center print and the emailed PDF.

Report Center — printing the report (with photos)

The Report Center button opens the print/export builder for THIS report's lines — choose columns, sort, page setup, then print or export to Excel. It includes a Photos column, so the expected/received photos print alongside each line. Save Query remembers your chosen layout for next time.

Send — emailing the report to customers

Send emails the report as a PDF (header, per-line verdicts and notes, and the photos) to the customers on the report. It opens a dialog listing each customer with an EDITABLE email — correct or add an address, untick anyone you don't want, then send. A result panel then tells you exactly who it went to and who was skipped, and why.

The sidebar alert & the Action Center

The Check Reports item in the sidebar carries a bell: it turns GREEN when reports are waiting on a manager's decision, and RED when one has been rejected and needs attention. The approvals themselves happen in the Action Center — the manager opens the case (with the report PDF attached), reads the lines and photos, and approves or rejects with a note, which flows straight back onto the report here.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Everything on this row is the standard set; Report Center, Export CSV and Import CSV each have their own section below. The only page-specific control is Add Vendor, which opens the form directly beneath the grid.

⤢

The vendor grid

One row per vendor. Click a row to open it in the form below; click the open row's header (or the fold arrow) to close it.

⤢

• Columns: ID, Account #, Branches, Name, Location, Email — plus a Balance column if you have Finance access, and any classification columns your workspace uses.
• Click a column header to sort.
• The Account # links to the vendor's ledger (Finance users).
• The round photo cell — click it to enlarge.

Adding or editing a vendor

Click Add Vendor for a blank form, or click any row to edit that vendor — it opens the same form just below the toolbar. The next steps walk through it. Nothing is saved until you click Save; Cancel (or the header) discards and closes.

⤢

Photo, Name, Account No. & contact

The photo box takes a click or a dropped image. Vendor Name is required. The Account No. is read-only — it's generated on save and links the vendor into the chart of accounts. Alongside are Email and, for vendors, Tax ID plus optional Birth/Starting dates.

Type (supplier vs service-provider)

"Type" is the vendor's own classification — supplier, service provider, etc. It's a separate idea from "supplied product categories": Type is what the vendor IS; supplied categories are what it SELLS. (This field used to be called "Category", which caused confusion with product categories — hence the rename.)

⤢

Supplied product categories — the key setting

Each vendor can list the product categories it supplies (the "supplied product categories" multi-select on the vendor form) — tick every category this vendor can provide. This is the Approved-Vendor-List link between a vendor and the products it can source.

⤢

Branch Restriction

A vendor's branches control which of your company branches can transact with it. The "All Branches" toggle opens it to every branch; otherwise untick it and pick specific ones. The line underneath tells you the current state ("All branches" or "Restricted to N").

⤢

Address & Notes

The Address block picks Country → Province → City (each cascades from the one above) plus a free-text street line. Notes is a free-text field for anything else you want on file for this vendor.

⤢

Print, Ledger, and saving

At the bottom of the form: Print produces a one-vendor detail sheet; Ledger (Finance users, once the vendor is saved) opens its account ledger; Cancel discards; Save writes your changes. Nothing is saved until you click Save.

Import from a spreadsheet

Import CSV loads vendors through the column-mapping dialog. See Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet. The rule that catches people here: the Branches column takes branch ID numbers, not names, and an empty cell means "all branches".

Export to a spreadsheet

Export CSV downloads EVERY vendor, whatever the grid is filtered to. See Introduction → Export to a spreadsheet.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it produces a vendor listing — the grid's columns plus Balance for Finance users, grouped by branch or classification if you want.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Everything on this row is the standard set; Report Center, Export CSV and Import CSV each have their own section below. The only page-specific control is Add Customer, which opens the form directly beneath the grid.

⤢

The customer grid

One row per customer. Click a row to open it in the form below; click the open row's header (or the fold arrow) to close it.

⤢

• Columns: ID, Account #, Branches, Name, Location, Email — plus a Balance column if you have Finance access, and any classification columns your workspace uses.
• Click a column header to sort.
• The Account # links to the customer's ledger (Finance users).
• The round photo cell — click it to enlarge.

Adding or editing a customer

Click Add Customer for a blank form, or click any row to edit that customer — it opens the same form just below the toolbar. The next steps walk through it. Nothing is saved until you click Save; Cancel (or the header) discards and closes.

Photo, Name, Account No. & contact

The photo box takes a click or a dropped image. Customer Name is required. The Account No. is read-only — it's generated on save and links the customer into the chart of accounts. Alongside are Email, Tax ID, and optional Birth/Starting dates.

Classification

The classification dropdowns (whatever your workspace defines for customers — for example Area, Class, Category) group customers so you can filter and report on them. Each comes from the lookup lists in Settings and clears back to "—".

Branch Restriction

A customer's branches control which of your company branches can transact with it. The "All Branches" toggle opens it to every branch; otherwise untick it and pick specific ones. The line underneath tells you the current state ("All branches" or "Restricted to N").

Address & Notes

The Address block picks Country → Province → City (each cascades from the one above) plus a free-text street line. Notes is a free-text field for anything else you want on file for this customer.

Print, Ledger, and saving

At the bottom of the form: Print produces a one-customer detail sheet; Ledger (Finance users, once the customer is saved) opens its account ledger; Cancel discards; Save writes your changes. Nothing is saved until you click Save.

Import from a spreadsheet

Import CSV loads customers through the column-mapping dialog. See Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet. The rule that catches people here: the Branches column takes branch ID numbers, not names, and an empty cell means "all branches".

Export to a spreadsheet

Export CSV downloads EVERY customer, whatever the grid is filtered to. See Introduction → Export to a spreadsheet.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it produces a customer listing — the grid's columns plus Balance for Finance users, grouped by branch or classification if you want.

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Everything on this row is the standard set; Report Center, Export CSV and Import CSV each have their own section below. The only page-specific control is Add Contractor, which opens the form directly beneath the grid.

⤢

The contractor grid

One row per contractor. Click a row to open it in the form below; click the open row's header (or the fold arrow) to close it.

⤢

• Columns: ID, Account #, Branches, Name, Location, Email — plus a Balance column if you have Finance access, and any classification columns your workspace uses.
• Click a column header to sort.
• The Account # links to the contractor's ledger (Finance users).
• The round photo cell — click it to enlarge.

Adding or editing a contractor

Click Add Contractor for a blank form, or click any row to edit that contractor — it opens the same form just below the toolbar. The next steps walk through it. Nothing is saved until you click Save; Cancel (or the header) discards and closes.

Photo, Name, Account No. & contact

The photo box takes a click or a dropped image. Contractor Name is required. The Account No. is read-only — it's generated on save and links the contractor into the chart of accounts. Alongside are Email, Tax ID, and optional Birth/Starting dates.

Classification

The classification dropdowns (whatever your workspace defines for contractors — for example Area, Class, Category) group contractors so you can filter and report on them. Each comes from the lookup lists in Settings and clears back to "—".

Branch Restriction

A contractor's branches control which of your company branches can transact with it. The "All Branches" toggle opens it to every branch; otherwise untick it and pick specific ones. The line underneath tells you the current state ("All branches" or "Restricted to N").

Address & Notes

The Address block picks Country → Province → City (each cascades from the one above) plus a free-text street line. Notes is a free-text field for anything else you want on file for this contractor.

Print, Ledger, and saving

At the bottom of the form: Print produces a one-contractor detail sheet; Ledger (Finance users, once the contractor is saved) opens its account ledger; Cancel discards; Save writes your changes. Nothing is saved until you click Save.

Import from a spreadsheet

Import CSV loads contractors through the column-mapping dialog. See Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet. The rule that catches people here: the Branches column takes branch ID numbers, not names, and an empty cell means "all branches".

Export to a spreadsheet

Export CSV downloads EVERY contractor, whatever the grid is filtered to. See Introduction → Export to a spreadsheet.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it produces a contractor listing — the grid's columns plus Balance for Finance users, grouped by branch or classification if you want.

Two tabs — Roster and Management

The strip at the top splits the page. ROSTER is the read-only staff list — click a row to view one employee's full record. MANAGEMENT is the employee journal register: every hire, edit, transfer, account change, and offboarding is drafted there as a journal, submitted for approval, and posted. The two meet in one direction only — what the register has posted is what the roster shows.

⤢

The buttons across the top

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count and the two-mode search box. This toolbar is deliberately lean — there is no Add, Import, or Export here, because the roster is read-only and every change is a journal on the Management tab. What remains: the search box (typing filters the loaded rows; Enter searches the whole database), the count, Report Center (prints or exports the roster), and the circular arrow, which here resets the search and sort and reloads.

⤢

The employee grid

One row per employee — photo, ID, Acc # (a link into its ledger for Finance users), name with a small Profile button that opens the person's full profile, title, grade, branch, Access (the branches their login may work in), salary with its currency, balance, and status. Admins get one more column at the end: a Login indicator showing whether this person has a user account. Click a column header to sort; click a row to open the read-only detail panel.

⤢

The employee header — a view, not a form

Click a row and the panel opens as a VIEW: the fields are facts to read, not inputs to fill. The header shows the profile photo (click it to enlarge), the name, and quick chips for job title, grade, branch, and Active/Inactive status. The Print button on the right produces a one-employee detail sheet. Click the panel's header bar to fold it away.

⤢

Tab 1 — Details & Address

The first tab is WHO the employee is and WHERE: their personal details, their job (title, grade, branch, department), and their address — all shown read-only. This is the tab you land on when you open an employee. The next steps walk its fields.

⤢

Details — personal & employment

The Details grid holds the employee's core facts:

⤢

• Account No. — read-only, generated when the employee was created; it links the employee into the chart of accounts.
• Full Name, ID Number, and Clock Badge ID (the biometric device user id that matches attendance imports).
• Job Title, Grade, Branch, and Department — the title drives the grade range and the department (its job family).
• Shift Override — a start/end/grace that differs from the pay schedule's shift, when one is set; blank means the person follows the schedule.
• Email, Status (Active/Inactive), Birth Date, Entry Date, Experience at hire, and Manager.

Details — Address

Country → Province → City (each cascades from the one above) plus the street line, shown exactly as recorded. Corrections are an Edit journal on the Management tab.

⤢

Details — ID Card Photo

Separate from the profile photo in the header, this slot holds a scan or photo of the employee's ID card — useful for HR records and verification. Like everything on the roster, it is shown read-only; replacing it is a journal change.

⤢

Tab 2 — Compensation & Benefits

The second tab is HOW the employee is paid: basic salary, the pay schedule and tax/social-insurance rules, and their individual pay lines (allowances, perks, deductions). Everything here feeds the payslip generator on the Payroll page — and everything here is read-only: pay changes go through an Edit journal's Compensation & Benefits section, which shows the current and proposed values side by side.

⤢

Compensation — Basic Salary, Currency, Rate

Basic Salary in the chosen Currency; Rate is that currency's exchange rate to your local currency, shown live for reference. If your workspace has a Guideline Matrix for this title+grade, a range hint shows under the salary — and the field turned amber when the amount was entered outside it (a soft warning, never a block).

⤢

Compensation — Pay Schedule & Jurisdiction

Pay Schedule sets how and how often this employee is paid (monthly, rotational, hourly…) — it drives the payslip generator, and its base method decides which conditional fields appear below (a Base % with its basis, or an Hourly rate). Jurisdiction sets which tax and social-insurance rules apply. Together they decide how each payslip is calculated.

⤢

Compensation — Tax Base & SI Base

These say WHAT the tax and social insurance are calculated on (for example basic-only, versus net of all components). Each carries a badge: INHERITED (following the jurisdiction's default) or OVERRIDE (set for this one employee). Most employees simply inherit.

⤢

Compensation — the per-employee pay lines

This panel is the heart of the employee's pay, rendered read-only:

⤢

• Earnings — this person's allowances and commissions on top of basic salary (housing, transport, a commission line…).
• Info Benefits / Deductions — non-cash perks (annual-leave days, a medical tier…) and any standing deductions.
• Statutory rows — Income Tax and Social Insurance (employee + employer) show with the real rates resolved from the employee's Jurisdiction. They are computed at payslip time, never typed.

Tab 3 — User Account (admins)

The third tab (admins only) shows the employee's LOGIN — completely separate from the employment record itself. It is read-only: the username, the account status, the allowed branches, and the AI Assistant tier this account uses. The single action on it is Start access change, which jumps to the Management tab with an access-changing journal already drafted for this person. An employee with no login shows a plain "No login account" — granting one is also an access-changing journal (walked in Employees Management).

⤢

Ledger, Opening Balance, and closing

At the bottom of the view: Ledger (Finance users) opens the employee's account ledger; Opening Balance sets their go-live starting balance; Close folds the panel. There is deliberately no Save — the panel never modifies anything.

⤢

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. On the Roster toolbar it produces a roster, a headcount, or a salary listing, depending on the columns you tick. The Management tab adds two more: its own Report Center prints the filtered journal register, and inside an open journal it reports that one change set — the lifecycle facts plus every old → new value.

The Management tab — every change is a journal

The register is the desk where employee records change. Each change is a JOURNAL: you draft it, Submit it (which files the canonical approval request in the Action Center), an approver Approves it, and Posting applies it — immediately when the effective date is today, or automatically when a future effective date arrives. The journal then stays for good as the audit record of who changed what, when, and why. The six event kinds follow in a moment.

The journal register

One row per journal: Journal # · event type · the employee (or the employee count, for an import) · owner · status, with its activation state beside it (a posted journal also shows Applied, or a pending clock) · branches · a summary of the change set as field: old → new · effective date · updated at. Click any column header to sort; the count beside the filters says how many journals survived them. Click a row to open the journal's drawer. Report Center, top right, prints or exports the filtered register.

⤢

Register filters

Seven ways to narrow the register: a free-text search (it matches journal #, event, status, owner, employee, branches, and the change summary), the event type, the status, the owner, the branch, and an effective-date from/to pair. Clear resets them all. The filters and sort are also what Report Center inherits when you print the register.

⤢

New change — the Create panel

Create journal (HR EDIT rights) opens the drafting panel. Pick the event type first — the form below reshapes to match it. Then set the journal's own facts: the Effective date (today for an immediate change, a future date to schedule one), a Reason (free text, kept on the audit record), and — for HR ADMINs — an Owner: Me, or one of the eligible owners the system previews for the branches the change touches. Create stores the journal as a Draft; nothing has changed yet.

⤢

The six event kinds

Every journal is one of six events:

⤢

• Onboarding — a new employee's complete starting record, compensation included; posting creates the employee.
• Import — many new employees from one spreadsheet; mapping and preview build a Draft (its own section below).
• Edit — a change to one or more fields of existing employees: pick the employee, the field, and the new value; the Compensation & Benefits choice edits salary, schedule, bases, and pay lines as one unit.
• Transfer — moves an employee to a destination branch and re-scopes the branches their login may work in.
• Access changing — drives the login account: username, allowed branches, account status, AI tier, a password reset — or a first username for an employee who has no account yet.
• Offboarding — the employee's exit; the final state is fixed at Inactive.

Access changing — and granting a first account

An access journal drives the LOGIN, never the employment record. For an employee who already has an account you can change the username, tick the branches they may work in (their home branch is always included and locked), set the account status Active or Inactive — the clean way to suspend someone's access — choose the AI Assistant tier, and tick Password reset requested.

For an employee with NO account the form is deliberately simpler: you grant a username, and posting PROVISIONS the account — branches and tier are optional, and there is no reset tick and no status to set because nothing exists yet to reset or suspend. Both of those journal flavours — a reset, and a first-time grant — are exactly the ones that ask for the new password at post (see the password section below).

⤢

Transfer — the branch and the working scope

A transfer journal names the employee, shows the current assignment read-only, and asks for the Destination branch. Below it, the allowed-branches grid re-scopes where the person's login may work — the home branch (the new destination, once posted) is locked in. Set the scope once here and the roster's Access column follows it.

Offboarding — the fixed final state

An offboarding journal names the employee, shows the current status read-only, and fixes the final status at Inactive — there is nothing else to configure, which is the point: an exit is recorded as an event with a reason, an owner, and dates, never as a quiet edit. Posted offboarding journals do not offer New change; bringing someone back is a fresh journal.

The journal drawer

Click a register row and the journal opens in a drawer — the record of the change. The header strip gives the lifecycle facts: status (with its activation state), event type, owner, effective date, and reason; below it the milestones — created, updated, submitted, approved, posted, applied — each stamped with when and by whom. The body lists the change set: per line, every field's old → new value (photos render as thumbnails; pay lines as added, changed, or removed components).

While the journal is still an editable draft you can rework it just here and Save; afterwards the change set is read-only. Reassign (when offered) hands a journal to another eligible owner. And New change — offered on a posted, applied journal — starts a fresh Edit draft for the same employees, instead of reopening what is already history.

⤢

The lifecycle — Draft → Submitted → Approved → Posted

A journal is born a DRAFT — only its owner sees it, and it can be edited or deleted freely. SUBMIT files the approval request — the canonical one, in the Action Center, where an approver Approves or Rejects it; Withdraw submission pulls it back to draft while it waits. Once APPROVED, the journal stands at the gate: POST applies the change set to the employee records and stamps the journal immutable. Approval licenses the change; only posting makes it real.

Posting — today, or on a future date

Post applies an approved journal. When the effective date is TODAY, the change lands immediately — the roster reflects it the moment it applies. When the effective date is in the FUTURE, posting records the decision now and the change applies automatically on that date: the register shows the pending clock, and the status gains its Applied state once it lands.

The at-post password panel

Two journals demand a password at the moment of posting: an access change with Password reset requested ticked, and an account provisioning (a username granted to an account-less employee). For those, the drawer grows an amber panel with New password and Confirm new password — type them, and Post hands the password to the server, which checks it against the password policy. Because a password cannot wait for a future date, these journals are same-day: a future effective date is refused until you set it back to today.

⤢

Import from a spreadsheet

Bulk hiring runs through the register too. In the Create panel pick Import, then Choose a CSV file: the same column-mapping dialog as everywhere else (see Introduction → Import from a spreadsheet) reads your file, pre-matches the columns, and shows a row-by-row preview you can fix in place — Grade and Department stay editable per row, because both depend on the job title. "Create import draft" turns the whole preview into ONE Draft journal carrying every row as a line; from there it is the ordinary lifecycle — Submit, Approve, Post — and posting creates the employees.

⤢

Search — filters every tab

The search box filters ALL three tabs at once by any value in the row — name, branch, jurisdiction, request type, dates…; the live count beside it ("N of M") always reflects what's shown. A READ-ONLY chip appears here when you lack HR admin — you can view + print, but not act on requests.

Save View

Remembers your current filters + date range for next login (saved per-employee to "Leave Desk"). The saved From date rides over the default 90-day range; the To date always resets to today on load, so a stale "up to" never hides recent rows.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it reports the CURRENT TAB — Balances, Requests or the Attendance Sheet — so switch to the tab you want before opening it. The print title carries the filter context, so the document states exactly what it shows.

Refresh

Reloads the desk from the server and clears the filters back to defaults — the quick reset after you've been narrowing things down.

The three tabs

One page, three peer tabs sharing the top bar above — Balances (who has what leave left), Requests (every leave request + the levers), and Attendance Sheet (the continuous day-by-day time record that feeds pay). The tour walks each in turn.

Filters — chips + pickers

A row of filter chips (per tab) and picker filters below them. Both apply to BOTH tabs and the print. The chips show a live count and never lie — the number is what clicking will show:

• Balances chips: All · Entitled · No policy · Has pending · Overdrawn. 'No policy' finds everyone whose leave would approve all-unpaid because no entitlement is configured; 'Overdrawn' finds anyone below zero.
• Requests chips: All · Pending · Approved · Rejected · Cancelled.
• Pickers: a From–To date range (defaults to the last 90 days; a Saved View overrides the From date), then Branch and Jurisdiction (options come from your actual roster). A 'Clear filters' button appears when anything is set.
• The range drives the two tabs differently: Requests shows every request whose span overlaps From–To; Balances are evaluated AS OF the To date (shown in the count bar), since entitlement is per-year and point-in-time.

Balances tab

One row per active employee (as of the To date in the toolbar range): their annual allowance, what's accrued so far, taken, and the balance — plus the sick yearly cap and sick days taken, and a badge for any pending requests. The numbers come from the same engine the approval card and the employee's own profile use, so they can never disagree. Sort any column. An employee with no policy configured says so in the row (in red) instead of showing blanks — that's a real finding, not a gap.

⤢

The per-year account ledger (in an expanded row)

For the chosen employee: one line per year with Carried in · Accrued · Taken · Adjustment · Balance. Balance is always derived (never a stored counter that could drift). Sick rows show '—' for balance because sick doesn't accrue — its remaining is caps minus taken, shown on the balance card above.

⤢

Decide / Re-decide, Revoke (in the expanded row)

The expanded row also carries the employee's request history AND the levers to act on them — the SAME verbs the assigned approver's Inbox carries, on the same Action Center rails, so nothing diverges:

⤢

• Decide (a PENDING request) — the Decide toggle opens the entitlement peek (the same card the approver sees) then the full verb bar: ✓ Approve · Approve · all unpaid · ✗ Reject (with a reason) · ↑ Escalate (re-assign to another approver) · Custom Reply. Approving runs the checkpoint (sets the paid/unpaid split + consumes the balance). Approving is REFUSED if any requested day is already punched / worked on the attendance sheet — leave can't sit on a worked day; clear those days or shorten the request first.
• Re-decide (an ALREADY-decided request) — the SAME panel and verbs: re-open the decision and choose a new one. The current decision is released first, so a re-approval sees today's true balance.
• Revoke (an APPROVED request) — the quick 'it isn't happening': releases the paid days, frees the dates, cancels the record.
• A decision (approve/reject) re-seeds the attendance sheet + slips and notifies the employee; an escalate hands the request to the new approver's inbox; and deciding a request assigned to someone else tells that approver it was done on their behalf. A posted/closed period is reported, never silently rewritten.

Requests tab — every request in one list

The second tab: every leave request overlapping the selected From–To range, newest first — employee, type, span, the decided paid/unpaid split (or the requested day count if undecided), status, and approver. Filter by status with the chips. Each row folds open to the SAME entitlement peek + verb bar you saw in the expanded balances row, so HR triages the whole company's requests here without profile-hopping. The tour opens one now and walks the panel button by button.

⤢

The decision panel (a request, expanded)

Clicking a request line folds it open into its decision panel — exactly the view the assigned approver gets. At the top sits the entitlement peek: the same balance card the approver's Inbox shows (carried in · accrued · taken · this request's cost), so you decide against the real remaining balance, not a guess. Below it is the verb bar — every action HR can take on this request. The tour spotlights each button next.

⤢

✓ Approve

Approves the request as filed. This runs the leave checkpoint: it sets the paid/unpaid day split from the employee's entitlement, consumes the balance, re-seeds the attendance sheet + any affected payslips, and notifies the employee. Approving is REFUSED if any requested day is already punched / worked on the attendance sheet — leave can't sit on a worked day; clear those days or shorten the request first.

⤢

Approve · all unpaid

Approves the same span but forces EVERY day unpaid, bypassing the paid-entitlement draw. Use it when the balance shouldn't be touched — leave granted as a favour, an out-of-policy absence you're recording rather than paying, or an employee who asked to keep their paid days. Same downstream re-seed + notify as a normal approve; only the paid/unpaid split differs.

⤢

✗ Reject

Declines the request. It opens a reason box — the reason is REQUIRED and travels to the employee with the rejection notice, so there's always a recorded 'why'. Rejecting consumes no balance and books no days; the dates stay free on the attendance sheet.

⤢

↑ Escalate

Hands the decision to a DIFFERENT approver instead of deciding it yourself. It opens an approver picker (everyone eligible except the requester) plus an optional note; on send, the request lands in that person's inbox and they own the decision. Use it when the right sign-off is someone else's call — a manager, a department head, the employee's own line lead.

Custom Reply

Sends a free-text message back to the requester WITHOUT deciding — the request stays pending. For 'can you split this across two weeks?' or 'confirm you've cleared it with your team first' — a conversation turn, not a verdict. The reply text is required; the request keeps waiting for a real decision afterwards.

Revoke (on an approved row)

The one-click 'it isn't happening' that sits on the line of any already-APPROVED request — no need to open the panel. It cancels the approved leave entirely: releases the paid days back to the balance, frees the booked dates on the attendance sheet, re-seeds any affected payslips, and notifies the employee. The audit trail keeps the original approval and this revocation both.

🗑 Delete (a dead request)

Only a cancelled or rejected request — one that already books nothing — carries a Delete button inside its panel. It removes the line from the history for good (with a confirm first). This is housekeeping for dead records; it can never touch a request that still holds days, because those must be revoked (which releases the days) before there's anything safe to delete.

Attendance Sheet tab — the continuous record

The third tab is the whole company's attendance as ONE continuous record — every employee, every day in the range, independent of any pay period (a pay period is just a CLAIM over a slice of it). Each employee is a collapsed row — Worked / Unpaid / OT totals, a coloured day-strip, and their overtime-rule badge — that you click to expand into a day-by-day table. A day is either FREE (period-less, editable right here) or BOOKED by a period (shown with its #period — edit it on that period's sheet). The date range, branch and search all come from the shared top bar above.

The action row

Across the top of the sheet sit its actions — Export, Import, Re-derive leave, Refresh, Save, and (once you tick free rows) Delete selected. The tour spotlights each one next.

Export

Writes an import-ready CSV of the shown range — it round-trips straight back through Import, so you can pull the sheet out, edit it in a spreadsheet, and re-import cleanly.

Import — from the clock

Reads a CSV or biometric-clock export and lands the days period-less. AUTHORITATIVE per line: a punched line → Worked / OT; a blank line (the clock's un-ticked day) → Absent, or a holiday / approved-leave day if the calendar says so. A "Consider missing days as absent" checkbox in the preview decides days the file doesn't mention (ON = sweep to absent, the authoritative-clock default; OFF = leave untouched, so a manual edit survives). When the file has punch columns the preview skips the day-type / hours / OT columns (opt in per column to override); a punch-less file maps hours. Approved-leave days are protected.

Re-derive leave

Re-stamps approved leave across the shown range — use it after a working-days-mask or holiday-calendar change (leave otherwise auto-updates on each approval). It never touches punched / imported / manual rows; only period-less calendar-derived days.

Refresh / Cancel

Reloads the sheet for the date range. When you have unsaved edits it reads "Cancel (N)" — discarding those N pending edits and reloading — so it doubles as the undo for a mistaken change.

Save

Writes your edits. FREE days save period-less; a BOOKED-but-open day routes to its period and re-runs that period's payslip (no double-pay); posted / closed days are read-only and skipped. A punch on an approved-leave day is refused and reported back.

The day-type legend

The colour key for the day-strip and the table — worked, weekend / holiday (and their -worked variants), paid / unpaid leave, sick, absent, plus the booked-vs-free marker. Every coloured cell on the sheet maps back to one of these.

A day, expanded — Clocked → Worked + OT

The tour expanded an employee. Each day shows the raw punches (Clock in / out) then the DERIVED result: Clocked (total hours) → Worked + OT, plus a Status. Only the punches are an INPUT — Worked / OT / Status are read-only RESULTS you never type. The split follows the employee's OT-rule badge: DAILY (hours past the standard day → OT; a short day docks Absence) or WEEKLY (hours past the weekly threshold → OT over the whole ISO week, even across periods).

• Edit a FREE day's punches (+ a comment); Save recomputes the rest. You can't edit a result column — that would reverse-guess the hours.
• Approved leave refuses a punch (revoke via the leave desk to record work); a BOOKED day is editable only while its period is open.
• Each free row carries a checkbox — tick rows (or the header select-all) and "Delete selected" removes them in one pass behind a full-screen spinner; booked days have no checkbox, so a delete can't reach period data.

The Payroll toolbar

Top bar: the period count, a Year filter and a Status filter (Open / Submitted / Approved / Posted / Closed), the New Period button, Refresh, and Report Center. Payroll is organised by PERIOD — everything below is a period or something inside one.

New Period — Year & Month

New Period opens an inline panel. Start with WHEN: the Year and the Month. Everything else on the panel reacts to this plus the schedule you pick next.

⤢

New Period — Pay Schedule

The Pay Schedule is the key choice: it decides WHO gets a slip and HOW the period is cut. Only employees on this schedule are generated, and its frequency (Monthly / Bi-weekly / Weekly / rotational) sets the cycles. Each bi-weekly / weekly cohort runs as its own separate period.

⤢

New Period — the Cycles preview

This read-only box shows exactly what your Year + Month + Schedule resolved to: how many cycles will be created, each with its date range and its total / working days and scheduled hours. A monthly schedule is one cycle; a rotational or bi-weekly one can be several. If it says "No cycles eligible" (the cycle hasn't ended yet, or they already exist), Create is disabled and tells you why.

⤢

New Period — Assign to

HR admins can hand ownership of the period to another HR user (default is yourself). The approval + post notifications then route to the assignee, and the Branches list below follows the assignee's allowed branches, not yours.

⤢

New Period — Branches

Pick the branch scope: the All Branches chip, or specific branch chips (limited to the owner's allowed branches). Slips are generated only for employees in the chosen branches, and the scope is LOCKED at creation — generate, regenerate, submit and post-all all follow it.

⤢

New Period — Notes

Free-text notes for the period — anything the team should know about this run.

⤢

New Period — Create

Create makes the empty period(s). Its label tells you how many — "Create" for one, "Create N periods" when the schedule resolved several cycles, or "Nothing to create" when none are eligible (disabled). Nothing is calculated yet — you generate the slips from the period header next.

⤢

The periods grid

One row per pay period. Columns: Year · Month · Type (the pay schedule — Monthly / Bi-weekly / rotational) · From–To dates · Status · Payment (how many slips are fully paid) · Owner · Slips (active / total, plus excluded) · Branches. Click a row to open the period below.

The period lifecycle

Open a period and this dark header appears — it carries the period's place in the state machine: OPEN → SUBMITTED → APPROVED → POSTED → CLOSED. The status chip shows where it is; the buttons on the right change with the state. Approve / Reject are NOT here — they happen in the Action Center inbox, only for the configured approver.

The workflow buttons

Right of the header sit the buttons that move the period through its stages. They're state-dependent — you only see the ones valid for the current stage. The next steps open a period in each stage and point at its button in turn (so the demo period changes as we go).

⤢

Button — Generate Missing Slips

On an OPEN period. Adds a draft slip for every in-scope employee who doesn't have one yet — safe to click again (it only fills gaps, never touches existing slips). This is how the period gets populated after you create it. ("Regenerate All" beside it instead wipes and recomputes every slip — manual edits lost.)

⤢

Button — Submit Period

Also on an OPEN period. Sends the WHOLE period for approval — it moves from Open to Submitted. Approval itself happens in the Action Center inbox (only the configured approver can respond); if it's rejected, the reason shows on the header and the period drops back to Open.

⤢

Button — Post All

On an APPROVED period. Posts every non-excluded slip to the general ledger in one atomic action — each slip gets its TX number, the period becomes Posted, and the amounts are now real accounting entries. This is the commit.

Button — Close Period

On a POSTED period. Closes it permanently and LOCKS the calendar month — after this, no module (payments, journals, treasury, payroll edits) can write to that month. The "books are final for this month" action.

Button — Reopen

On a CLOSED period, FIN ADMIN only. Unlocks the month again so corrections can be made — and it's loudly audit-logged, because reopening a closed month is serious. Use it only to fix a genuine mistake.

Employee Advances

Expand this to see which employees have OUTSTANDING advance balances coming into the period — the amount, how much is already allocated, what remains, the recovery plan (how many lines), and the last slip that recovered from it. The slip generator's auto-recovery pulls deductions from these, so it's the operator's "who owes what" view before generating.

The Attendance Sheet

Expand this to record attendance for the whole period — one day-typed row per employee per day. It auto-seeds on first open and derives every day-type from your existing settings: the CONTRACT (the employee's pay schedule) gives the working-days mask and the standard day; the employee's JURISDICTION gives the public-holiday calendar; approved Vacation Requests give paid or unpaid leave; the hire date marks pre-hire days. A fresh sheet assumes everyone worked their full standard day — you only touch the exceptions.

One row per employee

Each employee is a summary row: their name and branch, then Worked / Unpaid / OT totals for the period, and a colour day-strip on the right — one tick per day of the period, coloured by day-type, so you can spot an odd week at a glance (hover a tick for its date and type). Click the row to expand that employee's days and edit them.

A day at a time

The expanded editor is one row per date: Date · Day · Type · In · Out · In 2 · Out 2 · In 3 · Out 3 · Worked h · Overtime · Comments · Approved by. The three In/Out pairs hold a SPLIT SHIFT — a day with a break (say 08:00–12:00 then 13:00–17:00) fills two pairs, and Worked h is the SUM of all pairs (the break is excluded), so a full split day reads 8h, not 4. Lateness is measured from the first punch, early leave from the last. Approved by is stamped by the system (the leave approver, the editor, or the importer); Comments is free text a leave day inherits from its request. Edited rows highlight in yellow until you Save.

• HOURS DRIVE THE DAY — you don't normally pick a Type. Enter (or import) a Clock in / Clock out and the engine derives the rest: hours past the standard day become Overtime; hours short of it become an Absence deduction; any hours on a weekend or a public holiday flip that day to Weekend worked / Holiday worked and earn its premium.
• Type is there for the cases a clock can't tell you: Sick, Paid or Unpaid leave, or a correction. Whatever you set by hand is respected — Re-seed and Import never overwrite a day you edited yourself.
• A worked rest-day earns its premium for the hours worked AND overtime for anything past a standard day — a part-day earns a part premium, so 6 hours of an 8-hour day is 6 hours of premium, not a whole one.

Importing a clock file

The clock file is the AUTHORITATIVE record of who was present — unlike a fresh sheet, which assumes everyone worked. For every employee in the file, a working day with NO punch becomes Absent: that means a missing row AND a row whose punch columns are empty — both say the same thing, the clock recorded nothing. Off-days, public holidays, approved leave and your own manual edits are never touched.

• Map the columns (an employee/clock id and a date are required), fix any flagged cell inline, tick the rows, Import. Real clock exports map by pattern — an id column called AC-No / Emp Code / User ID, a Date, and Clock In / Clock Out all land automatically. Your file does NOT need a day-type or status column; the day-type is worked out for you.
• Employees are matched by Clock / Badge ID first (the biometric device's User ID on the employee record), then employee id, code, or name.
• Public holidays are honoured on import: a punch on a holiday becomes Holiday worked and earns the premium; a holiday with no punch stays a paid holiday — nobody is ever marked absent on a holiday.
• Approved leave is protected: if a day in the file is ticked/worked but is ALREADY approved leave in the system, the preview STOPS and lists those days. A punch never overwrites approved leave — resolve them (revoke the leave or drop those rows), or click Import again to proceed and keep those days as leave (they're skipped).
• Each import is read as the WHOLE period's attendance, so importing a partial file marks the days it doesn't cover as Absent — re-import the full file (or add the missing punches) to correct it. The result reports how many days it marked absent, plus unmatched employees, out-of-period dates, and any incomplete punch (only a clock-in or only a clock-out).

The sheet's buttons

Everything you do to the sheet lives in this one strip, left to right: Export · Import · Re-seed · Clear · Cancel · Save.

• Save writes your edited days and AUTO-RECALCULATES the affected slips in the same click — you don't go and press Recalculate. Slips you've hand-edited are skipped and named, so your manual work is never overwritten. It's disabled until there's something to save, and the count shows how many cells are pending.
• Cancel throws away your unsaved edits and reloads the sheet from the server. Also disabled until you have pending edits.
• Re-seed re-derives day-types from the CURRENT contract mask + holiday calendar + approved leave, then recalculates. Run it after you add a public holiday or approve a leave request — a calendar off-day wins over an imported guess (nobody stays 'absent' on a holiday), while your manual edits stay put.
• Clear deletes the whole sheet for the period and seeds a fresh one — the way out when a seed or an import went wrong and you want to start over.
• Export writes the sheet with the same columns the importer reads (punches included), so you can edit it outside and bring it straight back.

The slip sheet

Inside the period, one row per employee slip: Slip # · Employee · Branch · State (Draft / Posted / Excluded) · Owner · Date · TX (the GL transaction once posted) · Payment (links to the Payments page once paid). Excluded slips stay on the sheet but skip the GL post. Click a slip to open its detail.

Filtering the slip sheet

Narrow the sheet: All Slips, Active Only (hide excluded), or Excluded Only. The count on the right shows how many of the total are visible. Refresh reloads the slips, and Report Center prints / exports the filtered sheet.

Include closed periods

An admin-only toggle: normally slips whose date falls in a CLOSED (locked) calendar month are hidden. Turn it on to show them (dimmed) for audit or research — it doesn't unlock anything, it's read-only visibility, and the choice is remembered per user.

A pay slip

Opening a slip shows the whole payslip for that employee: the earnings and deductions that make up their pay, a read-only attendance summary, HR perks, and slip-level actions — all in this employee's salary currency. The next steps walk it.

Slip actions — the row

This row holds every action that applies to THIS one slip (draft slips show the most). Note what's NOT here: Submit / Approve / Post — those act on the whole period from the header, never per slip. The next steps take the buttons one at a time.

Recalculate from Settings

Wipes this slip's lines and re-pulls the defaults from current settings — the grade salary matrix, the tax brackets, and the social-insurance rates. Use it after changing settings, or to throw away manual edits and start clean. It only touches this slip (the period-header "Regenerate All" does it for every slip at once).

Edit Lines

Opens the line editor (a later step) to tweak amounts on top of the auto-computed defaults, or add one-off lines — a bonus, an advance, a manual deduction. This is the manual-override entry point for a single slip.

Exclude from post

Marks this slip to be SKIPPED when the period posts — the slip stays visible on the sheet (struck-through) but never hits the GL. Use it for a leaver, a disputed slip, or anyone who shouldn't be paid in this run. "Manage Exclusion" later edits the reason or re-includes them.

Print the payslip

The Report button (top-right of the slip) prints or exports THIS slip as a formatted payslip document via Report Center — the copy you hand to the employee. (The Delete button, on a draft, removes the slip entirely.)

The lines table

The heart of the slip: every individual earning and deduction line for this employee, each in their salary currency (with the local-currency conversion beside it). Once the slip is posted, each line links to its GL transaction. The three coloured totals at the bottom are what everyone reads — the next steps highlight each.

Gross Earnings

The green total: everything the employee EARNS this period added up — basic salary plus allowances, overtime, bonuses and any other earning lines. This is pay before anything is taken off.

Total Deductions

The red total: everything taken OFF the gross — income tax, the employee's social-insurance share, advances being repaid, and any manual deductions. Employer contributions are NOT in here (they're company-side; they show as a separate purple bucket when present, and never reduce the employee's pay).

Net Pay

The blue total: Gross Earnings − Total Deductions = what the employee actually takes home, and the amount the Payments page will pay. This is the number the whole slip exists to produce.

Attendance

A READ-ONLY summary of this employee's attendance for the period — paid vs unpaid days, premium days (weekend / holiday worked) and overtime hours: the day-types that produced this slip's premium earnings and its Unpaid-Days / Absence deductions. You edit attendance on the period's Attendance Sheet (above the slip sheet), not here. HR Perks (from the employee's grade) show below as read-only context.

The line editor

Edit Lines opens this editor — the manual override for one slip. It has two sides that matter to net pay (Earnings + Deductions) plus a company-side section (Employer Contributions). Each line carries its own currency + rate. There's a "Pull defaults" toolbar at the top to refresh the auto rows from settings before you save. The next steps walk each section.

Editor — Earnings

The green Earnings section: every earning line, editable. Change an amount, or add a one-off line (a bonus, an extra allowance) by picking the component and clicking Add. Anything you add here increases Gross Earnings — and therefore Net Pay.

Editor — Deductions

The red Deductions section: tax, social insurance, advance repayments, manual deductions — all editable, and you can add a one-off deduction the same way. Advance-repayment lines are aware of the remaining balance. More here means a lower Net Pay. (Below, the purple Employer Contributions section is company-side only — it never changes the employee's net.)

Editor — Save

Save Lines writes your changes and recomputes Gross / Deductions / Net. On a POSTED slip (FIN admin) the button reads "Reverse & Repost": only the lines you actually changed are reversed and re-posted to the GL — untouched lines keep their existing entries. Cancel discards everything.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. This page has both levels: the periods grid at Layer 1, or a period's slip sheet at Layer 2 — a payroll register either way. A single payslip is not printed from here; it has its own Print button on the slip.

The General Bills header

The brown header names the page and counts what's loaded — how many contractors and how many bills across them. The controls on the right (next steps) filter and search that list. General Bills is FIN-gated: Finance VIEW to see it, Finance EDIT to add bills and edit your own draft lines, Finance ADMIN to delete or edit posted lines.

⤢

Search

Type to filter the loaded contractor list live; press Enter to run a wider SERVER search (across all bills, not just the current page), Escape to clear. Use it when the contractor you want isn't in view.

Branch filter

Narrow to one branch — limited to the branches you're allowed to see, applied server-side. General bills are branch-dimensioned (a bill can even span branches, one branch per line), so this scopes the whole list to a branch's costs.

Contractor filter

Filter to a single contractor. The + button beside it jumps to the Contractors page with the Add form ready (Back returns here) — add a new contractor without losing your place.

⤢

Currency filter

Show only contractors whose bills include a chosen currency. Bills are multi-currency — each line carries its own currency and the exchange rate locked at post time.

⤢

The contractor grid

One row per CONTRACTOR — name/account, how many bills, and the running balance (what you owe them). Sort by any column; a card view and a Report Center (print/export) are on the toolbar. Click a contractor row to open their bills below.

A contractor's bills — the drill

Opening a contractor drops down a brown panel with everything you owe them. It has two levels: the list of BILLS, and — when you expand a bill — that bill's expense LINES. The next steps walk it: the bills list, creating a bill, and the line editor + posting.

⤢

The bills list

One row per BILL for this contractor: bill # · Kind (Overhead / Logistics) · date · branch(es) · line counts (total / draft / posted) · the amount per currency + the local total · status (Draft or Posted, with a "Cust" badge for customer-distributed bills) · the customers it's split across · owner. Totals sit at the bottom. Click a bill to expand its lines.

Add Bill

The Add Bill button (Finance Edit) starts a new bill header for this contractor. A bill is just the header — you add its expense lines after creating it.

The New Bill form

The tour opened the New Bill form for you. Creating a bill is deliberately light — the contractor is fixed (you opened them), and there's NO bill-level branch (branch is picked per LINE, so one bill can span branches). The next steps walk every field in it.

New Bill — Slip Photo

Optional: attach a photo or scan of the contractor's paper invoice / receipt so the source document travels with the bill. You can view it again later from the bill.

New Bill — Owner (admin)

Finance ADMINs only: create the bill on behalf of another employee (default is you). The assignee becomes the owner and gets a notification — used when one person enters bills for a team.

New Bill — Overhead vs Logistics

Overhead (default) draws its expense accounts from General Expenses. Logistics draws from Shipping Expenses — for a contractor invoice that's logistics-related but NOT tied to one shipment (e.g. a late combined bill). It only changes which account list the line picker offers, and it LOCKS after create.

⤢

New Bill — Customer-related

Tick this to make the bill CUSTOMER-DISTRIBUTED: every line must then be split across customers, and posting happens in two stages (debit each customer / credit the expense). Leave it off for a plain overhead cost. Also LOCKS after create — it changes how the whole bill posts.

⤢

New Bill — Create

Create saves the bill HEADER (Cancel discards it). Nothing is posted yet — you add the expense lines next and post them from the expanded bill. The kind and customer-related choices above are frozen from this point on.

The expanded bill

Expanding a bill shows its EXPENSE LINES — one row per expense, with the account, branch, amount + currency, rate, and notes. This is where you build the bill: add lines while they're draft, then post them. The next steps walk an existing line, deleting one, the customer split, posting, and adding/editing a line field by field.

An existing line

Each row in the table is one expense line: its account name, expense type, branch, amount + currency, rate, notes, and a Draft/Posted status. CLICK a line to open it in the editor and change it. Editing a line on a POSTED bill reverts just that line to draft and reverses only its transaction (Finance ADMIN); draft lines are editable by the bill's owner.

Delete a line

The trash icon removes a line. On a draft line it just deletes it; on a posted line it reverses that line's transaction first. (Deleting the whole bill, from the bills list, reverses every posted line at once.)

Customer Distribution

On a CUSTOMER-RELATED bill, this purple table lists every line's split across customers (read-only here — you set the splits inside each line's editor). It's how the two-stage post knows how much of each expense to debit each customer. On a normal overhead bill it doesn't appear.

Post the bill

Post turns this bill's DRAFT lines into real ledger entries in one action — debit each expense account, credit the contractor. Already-posted lines are left untouched; the button says how many drafts it will post. Afterwards, a Finance ADMIN who edits a posted line auto-reverses that line back to draft.

Add Line

Add Line opens the line editor to add one expense to this bill (owner or admin). The next steps walk every field in it.

The line editor

The tour opened the Add-Line form. A line is a single expense on this bill; you fill a few fields and Save it as a draft. Editing a line on a POSTED bill reverts the bill to draft and reverses its transactions — so edits are safe, they just re-post.

Line — Expense (the account)

Pick the EXPENSE type; its debit account is set automatically. The Category dropdown beside it just narrows the expense list. On an Overhead bill these come from General Expenses; on a Logistics bill, from Shipping Expenses (the kind you chose when creating the bill).

Line — Branch

The branch this line posts to — the contractor leg AND every customer leg of the line land here. A Finance ADMIN may pick any branch the contractor operates in; a Finance Edit user is locked to their home branch (if the contractor isn't set up there it shows "Not in your branch"). This is why one bill can span branches — each line carries its own.

⤢

Line — Amount

The expense amount in the line's own currency (the raw amount). Together with the rate below it produces the local-currency amount, previewed under the fields.

Line — Currency

The currency this expense is billed in. Picking it auto-computes the exchange Rate from your currency settings. The Manage button jumps to Settings → Currencies (Back returns here).

Line — Rate

The exchange rate to your local currency, auto-filled from the currency but editable if this bill used a different one. Amount × Rate = the local amount that hits the books, and the rate LOCKS when the line posts.

Line — Notes

Optional free-text description for the line — what the expense was for.

Line — Customer distribution

Only on a CUSTOMER-RELATED bill: split this line's amount across the customers it's for (the shares must add up to the line amount). At post, the line then debits each customer instead of a plain expense. On a normal overhead bill this section doesn't appear.

⤢

Line — Save

Save Draft adds the line to the bill (Cancel discards it); on an existing line the button reads "Update Line". Enter saves, Escape cancels. The line joins the table above as a draft — repeat for each expense, then Post the bill.

Editing a line

The tour clicked an existing line to open it in the SAME editor, pre-filled with its values — every field above is editable and the button now reads "Update Line". On a POSTED bill a banner warns that saving reverts the bill to draft and re-posts only the line you changed. This is the safe way to correct a bill after posting: edit → save → it re-posts cleanly.

The Shipping Bills header

The blue header names the page; its controls (next steps) filter and search. Shipping Bills is FIN-gated — Finance VIEW to see, Finance EDIT to add/edit your own draft lines, Finance ADMIN to delete or edit posted lines. The core idea: these are a SHIPMENT's contractor costs, and each cost is split across the shipment's customers.

⤢

Search

Type to filter the loaded list live; press Enter to run a wider SERVER search across all bills, Escape to clear.

Branch filter

Filter shipments to one branch (server-side, within your allowed branches).

Contractor filter

Show only shipments that have at least one bill to the chosen contractor.

⤢

Customer filter

Show only shipments whose customer list includes the chosen customer — useful because a shipment's costs are distributed to its customers.

⤢

Currency filter

Show only shipments with at least one bill in the chosen currency.

⤢

Include closed periods

Admin-only: normally bills whose date is in a CLOSED (locked) period are hidden; turn this on to show them for audit (an "Audit mode" banner appears). Edits and posts against closed-period bills are refused until the period is reopened.

Post All Drafts

Bulk action: post every DRAFT line across every bill in the current view at once. A result dialog summarizes it, and a failure on one bill doesn't abort the others. The count shows how many bills have drafts to post.

Status chips

Quick filters by billing state: All · Not Billed (no bill yet) · Draft (has unposted lines) · Posted — each with a count. The fastest way to find shipments that still need billing.

The dashboard strip

At-a-glance totals for the current view: how many shipments are Not Billed / Draft / Posted, plus the total billed value with a per-currency breakdown.

⤢

The shipments grid

One row per SHIPMENT (shipped order) — its cargo, customers, billing status, and totals. Click a shipment row to open its bills below.

⤢

A shipment's bills — the drill

Opening a shipment drops down a blue panel: the BILLS raised against it, and — below — the Customer Distribution grid. Expand a bill to see its expense LINES. The next steps walk it: the bills list, creating a bill, the lines, the distribution, and posting.

⤢

The bills list

One row per BILL on this shipment: bill # · contractor · date · line counts (draft / posted) · amount per currency + local total · status (Draft / Posted). A shipment can carry bills from SEVERAL contractors. Click a bill to expand its lines.

⤢

Add Bill

Add Bill (Finance Edit) starts a new bill header on this shipment. A bill is just the header — you add its expense lines after creating it.

The New Bill form

The tour opened the New Bill form. It's short — the shipment is fixed (you opened it), and there's no bill kind or customer flag (every shipping bill is customer-distributed by nature). The next steps walk each field.

New Bill — Contractor

Pick WHICH contractor this bill is from — the one you owe for this leg (the shipping line, the clearing agent, the trucker…). The + button adds a new contractor without leaving (Back returns here with the form intact). Because a shipment can involve several contractors, each gets its own bill.

⤢

New Bill — Slip Photo

Optional: attach a photo or scan of the contractor's invoice so the source document travels with the bill.

New Bill — Owner (admin)

Finance ADMINs only: create the bill on behalf of another employee (default is you); the assignee becomes owner and gets a notification.

New Bill — Create

Create saves the bill HEADER (Cancel discards it). Nothing is posted yet — you add the expense lines next and post from the expanded bill.

The expanded bill

Expanding a bill shows its EXPENSE LINES — one row per cost, with the expense, amount + currency, rate, notes, and status. This is where you build the bill: add lines while draft, then post. The next steps walk an existing line, delete, the customer distribution, posting, and adding/editing a line.

An existing line

Each row is one expense on the bill: its expense type, amount + currency, rate, notes, and Draft/Posted status. A surcharge line shows a ⚡ marker (it's scoped to specific customers). CLICK a line to edit it; editing a posted line reverses just that line's transactions and re-posts on save (Finance ADMIN).

Delete a line

The trash icon removes a line — a draft line is just deleted; a posted line has its transactions reversed first.

Customer Distribution — the heart of Shipping Bills

This purple grid is what makes Shipping Bills different from General Bills: every line's cost is ALLOCATED across the shipment's customers. For a normal line the split is computed automatically from cargo × expense rules (each customer's share of the shipment); for a surcharge line it goes only to the customers you scoped it to. While lines are draft it shows a PREVIEW; at post it becomes real — debit each customer, credit the contractor. Report Center prints it.

Post the bill

Post turns this bill's DRAFT lines into real ledger entries in one action — following the distribution, it debits each customer their share and credits the contractor. Already-posted lines stay untouched; the button says how many drafts it will post. ("Post All Drafts" on the toolbar does this for every bill in the view at once.)

Add Line

Add Line opens the line editor to add one expense to this bill. The next steps walk every field.

The line editor

The tour opened the Add-Line form. A line is a single expense on this bill; fill a few fields and Save it as draft. Editing a line on a posted bill reverts just that line and re-posts on save.

Line — Expense

Pick the EXPENSE type (the Category dropdown narrows the list). Its debit account is set automatically. If you pick a SURCHARGE-type expense, a customer-scope picker appears (a later step) so you can target specific customers instead of the automatic split.

Line — Amount

The expense amount in the line's own currency. With the rate below it produces the local amount, previewed under the fields.

Line — Currency

The currency this expense is billed in; picking it auto-computes the exchange Rate. Manage jumps to Settings → Currencies.

Line — Rate

The exchange rate to your local currency, auto-filled but editable. Amount × Rate = the local amount, and it LOCKS when the line posts.

Line — Notes

Optional free-text description of the expense.

Line — Surcharge customer scope

Only when the expense type is a SURCHARGE: instead of the automatic cargo-share split, you choose WHICH customer(s) bear this cost (each shown with their % of the shipment). Use it for a cost that belongs to specific customers, not the whole shipment. Normal (non-surcharge) lines skip this and split automatically.

⤢

Line — Save

Save Draft adds the line (on an existing line it reads "Update Line"). Enter saves, Escape cancels. The line joins the table as a draft and its share flows into the distribution preview — repeat for each cost, then Post.

Editing a line

The tour clicked an existing line to open it in the SAME editor, pre-filled — every field is editable and the button reads "Update Line". On a posted line, saving reverses that line's transactions and re-posts the change (other posted lines untouched). The safe way to correct a shipping bill after posting.

The Payments toolbar

The control row: search, the filters (direction in / out · type · branch · currency · owner · dates), the view toggle (flat table vs entity cards), and the action buttons — New Payment, New Payroll Payment, Post All, Reconcile All, Report Center. Payments is FIN-gated (VIEW to see, EDIT to add/edit your drafts, ADMIN for more).

New Payment — the form

The tour opened the New Payment form. A payment has a HEADER (who, which direction, which branch) plus one or more LINES, each moving cash through an account and ALLOCATED against an outstanding document. Save Draft keeps it editable; Save & Post commits it to the ledger. The next steps walk every part. ("New Payroll Payment" on the toolbar is the same idea, pre-built from a whole pay period.)

New Payment — Direction

Receive (money coming IN — a customer pays you, an employee refunds an advance) or Pay (money going OUT — you pay a vendor, contractor, or salary). Direction flips which side of the cash account moves and which documents you can allocate against.

⤢

New Payment — Entity type

WHO the payment is with: Customer, Vendor, Contractor, or Employee. It sets which entity list the picker below offers and which outstanding documents the allocation can target. Employee is for advances — Pay disburses, Receive refunds, and the pay-slip's advance line recovers it automatically when the slip posts.

⤢

New Payment — Entity & Branch

Pick the specific entity, then its BRANCH (the arrow makes the flow explicit). The branch LIMITS the allocation below — only that branch's outstanding documents are offered — so a payment settles debts in the right branch. The +New button (customer / vendor / contractor) jumps to that page's Add form and returns here with the payment intact.

⤢

New Payment — the lines

One or more lines, each: Amount + Currency + Rate (raw × rate = local), Pay via (the cash / bank / wallet account this line moves through — different lines can use different accounts, a split-method payment), optional Notes, and a per-line Slip photo. Add Line adds more; the Total shows the local sum. Each line is allocated in the picker directly below it.

⤢

New Payment — Allocation (level 1)

This is what makes a payment settle the right debt — and it's the FIRST of two reconciliation levels. Pick a scope tab (the tabs differ by entity type: contractor → shipping / general bills; vendor → active order / archived SO#; customer → all of those plus service fee), then a document. Each option shows Total / Paid / Outstanding, sorted most-due first, and the amount auto-caps at the doc's outstanding; any residue floats. Leave a line Unallocated and its cash sits as entity credit. The SECOND level — splitting one line across several docs — is the Reconcile dialog, later in this tour.

⤢

New Payment — Save Draft vs Save & Post

Save Draft stores it with NO ledger impact yet — editable, postable later. Save & Post commits every line to the GL immediately (skips the preview). Cancel discards the form. Draft-first is the safe path when you're still gathering slips or allocations.

⤢

The metrics strip

Counts for the current view plus the NET money per currency (money in minus money out) — a quick read of how much has actually moved.

The payments list

Two views (toggle on the toolbar): a flat TABLE — one row per payment (number, entity, direction, amount, status Draft / Posted, date) — or entity CARDS that GROUP payments by who they're with (click a card to expand that entity's payments). Click a payment to open its detail below.

A payment — the drill

The tour opened the payment with the most lines. It shows the HEADER (entity, branch, direction, owner) and a LINES table — each line's cash account, raw / rate / local, its allocation, TX#, slip and status — plus the buttons that act on it. The next steps walk the lines, the allocation column, and Post / Reconcile / Add Line / Report.

The lines table

One row per line: Ser, Tx date, the cash account it moved through (Received in / Paid via), Raw + Cur + Rate + Local, its Allocation, the TX# (click to drill into the General Ledger row), notes, slip thumbnail, and a Draft/Posted status. Click any line to open it in the editor below; drafts get a trash icon to delete. Totals sit at the bottom.

The Allocation column

Per line, which document(s) the cash was applied to and each doc's live state — an OUT badge (still owed) or ✓ paid — plus a FLOAT chip when part of the line's cash is still unallocated (sitting as entity credit). A multi-doc line shows one tag per allocation. This column is the answer to "what did this money settle?"

⤢

Post

Turns this payment's DRAFT lines into real ledger entries in one action; the button says how many drafts it will post and opens a pre-post preview first. Already-posted lines are untouched. (Editing a posted line later atomically reverses its live transaction and re-posts the new values.)

⤢

Add Line

Adds another draft line to this payment using the SAME editor as the New Payment form — amount, currency, cash account, and the allocation picker. Use it to split one payment across several cash accounts or several documents, then post the new lines.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. This is the record-level one: it reports THIS payment as a voucher or receipt for the entity, with its lines and allocations. The toolbar's Post All and Reconcile All act across every payment in view. The Reconcile button beside it is the whole next section.

Reconcile — the second level

The tour opened Reconcile on the posted payment with the most lines. Level 1 (in the form) put ONE doc on each line; Reconcile is level 2 — it edits the payment-allocation junction directly, so a single posted line's cash can be SPLIT across several outstanding docs, or shifted from one to another. It works only on POSTED lines (drafts have no cash in the ledger yet) and never touches the GL — allocation lives off to the side. It's hidden for payroll periods and employee advances (their allocations are slip-driven).

⤢

Reconcile — smart defaults

The green banner states the rules the dialog enforces: adding a row pre-fills the line's remaining float; picking a doc auto-caps the amount to min(doc outstanding, line remaining); every amount stays editable; a sum BELOW the line total leaves the rest as entity credit (float); a sum ABOVE it is refused at save. So you can't over-allocate a line or a doc.

⤢

Reconcile — a posted line

One card per posted line — its raw / currency / rate, a live STATE badge (entire amount floats · N floats · fully allocated · over-allocated), and the allocation rows beneath. Each row is a scope + document picker with its own editable amount, notes, a View button (doc side), and a remove ✕. This is where one line becomes many allocations.

Reconcile — split a line

Add allocation appends a row pre-filled with the line's remaining float — pick a second doc and the line's cash splits across both. The button only shows while the line still has float AND every existing row already has a doc, so you can't spawn empty rows. Each line saves on its OWN Save Line button (per-line atomic): a partial failure leaves the other lines saved.

Reconcile — the doc side (live)

Click View on any row and the dialog splits: the right pane shows that DOCUMENT and every payment allocated to it across the whole system — the doc-as-master perspective — updating live as you edit on the left. So you reconcile from both directions: line → docs on the left, doc → payments on the right. Report Center prints one row per allocation.

Employee advances

The tour opened an Employee + Pay payment — an ADVANCE. Paying an employee outside payroll (Pay) disburses an advance; Receive would refund one. An advance isn't an expense — it's money the employee owes back, recovered over time. Each posted advance line carries a green Recovery Plan panel, walked next.

Advance — the recovery plan

One green panel per advance line. It schedules how the advance is clawed back in installments, and tracks progress: the header shows Total advance vs Planned, and flags any gap (Δ) — the plan total must equal the advance before it can save.

Advance — the installments

One row per installment: planned date, planned amount, how much has been Recovered vs Unrecovered, and a State chip (⏳ Pending · ⚠ Due · ◐ Partial · ✓ Recovered). This is the running picture of what the employee still owes and when each slice is due.

Advance — edit & templates

Edit plan unlocks the rows; Apply template generates equal installments (monthly / quarterly / yearly) from a start date, or build them by hand with Add installment. Save commits (total must match the advance). Once an installment has been recovered it locks — its date can't move, it can't be dropped, and its amount can only grow above the recovered floor; templates only regenerate the not-yet-recovered portion.

Advance — how recovery happens

You don't post recoveries here. When the employee's PAY SLIP is posted, its deduction_advance line automatically writes a pay_slip allocation against this advance — that's what fills the Recovered column and flips installments to ✓. The plan is the schedule; the slip is the engine. (This is why the allocation picker is hidden for advances — the slip owns it.)

Payroll run — the form

The tour opened New Payroll Payment (the purple form). Instead of typing lines, it builds ONE payment from a whole PAY PERIOD: every payable slip line becomes a payment line whose debit is the liability the slip created (Wages / Tax / SI Payable) and whose credit is the cash account you pick — auto-allocated (auto-reconciled) to its slip, so there's no manual allocation. The next steps walk it.

Payroll run — pick the period

Choose an unpaid pay period (only approved/posted periods not already claimed by another Payment# are listed); the form then loads every payable slip line. Regenerate re-pulls those lines if the slips were edited after you opened the form. Date and Owner (admins can assign) sit beside it.

Payroll run — the employee table

Once a period is loaded, one row per EMPLOYEE appears (name · title · branch · slip# · line count · local total), each with a check box (checked = include in Post) and Select all / Unselect / Invert. Expand a row to see its component breakdown — every slip line with its kind badge (earning / tax / SI / advance), amount, the counter account it settles, and a per-line Pay-via cash picker — plus a "Post this slip" button that posts just that employee now.

Payroll run — one cash account for all

The typical case is "the whole run goes through Bank A" — this strip sets that one cash account across every line at once (each expanded row can still override per line). Every line needs a Pay-via account before the run can post.

Payroll run — Save Draft vs Save & Post

Save Draft persists every line as a draft (no GL). Save & Post persists them all but POSTS only the lines whose employee row is checked — unchecked employees stay as drafts on the SAME Payment# for a later post. So you can pay part of the run now and the rest when funds arrive, all under one payment number.

Payroll run — the posted detail

The tour opened a posted payroll-period payment. Its detail is different from an ordinary one: lines are GROUPED by employee, each group headed by a blue banner (name · title · branch · slip#). There's no per-line allocation picker — each line is already tied to its own slip. The next steps walk the group controls.

Payroll detail — the employee group

The blue header opens each employee's block of slip lines. When the group still has drafts, it carries its own "Post (N)" check box — check the employees you want to pay now; the rest stay as drafts on this same Payment#. It's the same selective-post idea as the create form, but on an already-saved run.

Payroll detail — Post selected

Posts only the checked employees' draft lines (with a pre-post preview), leaving everyone else as drafts on this Payment#. Select all / Unselect / Invert sit beside it. This is how a payroll run is paid in waves without splitting it across multiple payment numbers.

Payroll detail — Regenerate from slips

Rebuilds this payment's DRAFT lines from the period's CURRENT slip state — use it after a slip was edited. It preserves already-posted lines and your cash-account picks, and only refreshes the drafts, so the payment stays in step with the payroll without starting over.

The Treasury toolbar

The filter row: search (Enter runs a server search, Esc clears), then branch · operation type (Cash Transfer / FX / Petty Cash) · status (Draft / Posted) · currency · a date range. Beside them sit the view toggle, Save View, Report Center, reload, Post All Drafts, and New. Treasury is FIN-gated — Finance VIEW to read, EDIT to create / edit / post your own drafts, ADMIN to edit posted entries and see all owners.

Table vs Cards

Toggle between a flat TABLE (one row per entry, every column) and type CARDS (three cards — Cash Transfer / FX / Petty Cash — pinned at the bottom, each with its counts and per-currency totals). Click a card to open just that type's table above it. The tour visits the cards near the end.

⤢

Include closed periods

Finance ADMINs only: closed-period entries are hidden by default (their period is locked). Toggle this on to bring them back into view for audit or research — they stay read-only.

Post All Drafts

Posts every draft you're allowed to post in one batch — it opens a pre-post preview first, and the commit is atomic per entry (one bad entry doesn't roll back the rest). The button shows how many drafts qualify; it's hidden when there are none.

The dashboard strip

Above the list: counts (Total · Drafts · Posted · Edited) and the posted local total, plus a per-currency raw→local breakdown of posted activity. It always reflects the CURRENT filters, so narrowing the list re-scopes the numbers.

New Treasury Entry

The tour opened the New Treasury Entry form (the New button). One form shapes all three operations — you pick the type, the two accounts, and the money. Save Draft keeps it editable; Post... opens the pre-post preview. Branch isn't a field here — it's stamped from your login. The next steps walk every part.

New — the operation type

Cash Transfer (same currency both sides — the amount is entered once), FX Exchange (each side its own currency and rate; the form keeps the two legs equal in local), or Petty Cash (same shape as a transfer, tagged for audit). The type LOCKS once the entry is created — it changes how the whole entry balances and posts.

New — Date · Owner · Slip · Notes

Date drives period-close gating. Owner is you (Finance ADMINs can create on behalf of another employee). Slip is an optional photo/scan of the paper voucher — it auto-saves. Notes is free text that travels to the GL and audit log.

New — From & To accounts

Pick the source (From) and destination (To) cash GROUPS — the last-level parent (cash / bank / wallet). You don't pick the exact leaf: on post the system resolves the right currency-specific account under that group (and auto-creates it if missing). The arrow between them shows the direction; for FX it's a two-way arrow.

New — currency, rate & amount

Each side carries a Currency (rate auto-fills from settings), a Rate to local, and an Amount — raw × rate = the local value shown beneath. A Cash Transfer / Petty Cash shows ONE amount set (same currency both sides); an FX Exchange shows TWO blocks so each leg has its own currency, rate, and amount.

New — the balance check

The strip shows From local vs To local and a Balanced / Imbalanced verdict. For a same-currency transfer they always match. For FX, editing one side's amount or rate auto-syncs the other so the two legs stay EQUAL in local — because the posting must balance (the ledger rejects an imbalanced entry). Red "Imbalanced" means fix a rate or amount before posting.

New — Save Draft vs Post

Save Draft stores the entry with no GL impact — editable and postable later. Post... opens the pre-post preview (the only modal here); confirming there writes the ledger entry. Cancel discards the form.

The entries table

One row per entry: Entry# · TX# (click to drill into the General Ledger) · date · type · the From and To accounts with each leg's raw / cur / rate / local · branch · status · owner · slip. Sort any column; click a row to open its detail below.

An entry — the drill

The tour opened the fullest entry (an FX exchange if you have one — two legs, two currencies). It shows both legs (each account is a link into the ledger), the slip, notes, and the buttons that act on it. Editing happens right here in the panel. The next steps walk the legs, the slip, and the actions.

The two legs

The From and To leg summaries — each account (a link that opens its General Ledger, with Back returning here), the raw amount + currency + rate, and the local value. This is the money movement laid out both ways: what left the source and what landed in the destination.

⤢

The slip

Attach or view the voucher / bank slip for this entry. It AUTO-SAVES the moment you attach or remove it — there's no save button — so the source document always travels with the entry.

⤢

The entry actions

For a DRAFT (owner or admin): Edit in place, Post... (opens the preview), or Delete. For a POSTED entry, a Finance ADMIN gets Edit (posted) — an atomic REVERSE + REPOST: it reverses the original GL entry and posts the new values in one step (the entry keeps its number and bumps an edit count). Report Center prints/exports this entry.

⤢

The cards view

The tour switched to Cards. Instead of a flat table, the three operation types sit as cards — each showing its draft / posted counts and a per-currency raw→local breakdown. Click a card to open just that type's entries above it, then a row to drill in exactly as in table view. It's the same data, grouped by what kind of movement it is.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific to the Chart of Accounts: an Entity-accounts toggle, Collapse / Expand to fold the whole tree at once, Rebuild Balances for admins, and Add. The count beside the title is your STRUCTURAL accounts — plus entity sub-accounts when those are shown.

Entity accounts

Every customer, vendor, contractor, and employee gets its OWN sub-account (that's how their balances live in the ledger) — created automatically by those modules, and marked "auto". They're hidden by default to keep the structural chart readable; tick this to fold them in.

⤢

Rebuild Balances (admin)

Finance ADMINs only: a maintenance action that repairs the chart (drops phantom transactions, orphan subtrees, out-of-sync payment rows) and RECOMPUTES every account's balance from the GL transactions. The same repair runs automatically on each deploy — this button is the between-deploy trigger. It doesn't change any real posting, only fixes bookkeeping drift.

⤢

Type & scope filters

The chips filter the tree by account TYPE (All · Asset · Liability · Equity · Revenue · Expense · Income · Cost · OB-Asset · OB-Liability), each in its type colour with a live count. Beside them, filter by branch (accounts can be branch-restricted) and by currency.

The account tree

One row per account, indented by depth with a chevron to fold/unfold a parent's children. Columns: Acc # (a link — click it to open the ledger), Account Name, the type badge, currency, branch restriction, and Balance. Parent (header) rows are bold and show the ROLLED-UP balance of everything beneath them; leaf rows are the accounts that actually get posted to.

Row actions

On each editable account (Finance Edit): + adds a CHILD account under it, the pencil renames it, and (admin, only on a childless leaf) the trash deletes it. Auto-created entity accounts show "auto" / "locked" instead — they're owned by their module, not edited here.

⤢

Add an account

The Add button opens the New Account modal (the same modal the row + button opens, but starting at the root). The tour opens it next.

New Account

The tour opened the New Account modal. You place the account under a parent, name it, type it, and optionally restrict it to branches — the account NUMBER is generated for you from the parent. The next steps walk each field.

New — Parent & number

Pick the PARENT (or Root for a top-level account) — that's where it sits in the hierarchy. The Account Number is then auto-generated from the parent's number (for a parent's first child you can choose zero-padded 0001/0002 vs plain 1/2). You don't type the number; on an existing account it can't change.

New — Account Name

The human name for the account, e.g. "Insurance Expense". This is what shows in the tree, on the ledger, and in every posting.

New — Account Type

Asset / Liability / Equity / Revenue / Expense / Income / Cost / Opening-Balance — it drives the account's colour and how its balance is read (debit-normal vs credit-normal). It auto-inherits from the parent, so children of an Expense parent default to Expense; override only when you're branching into a different type.

New — Branch Restriction

Optional: tick the branches this account is allowed under. Leave all unticked for an unrestricted (all-branches) account. Restricting an account keeps branch-scoped users and pickers from posting to accounts that aren't theirs.

New — Save

Save creates the account (Cancel discards). It appears in the tree immediately under its parent, ready to receive postings. Renames and re-typing an existing account use this same modal.

An account's ledger

The tour opened the ledger of the account with the most activity (clicking any Acc # does this). The whole page becomes that account's ledger — its running balance built transaction by transaction. Back returns to the tree; ↑ Parent climbs to the parent account. The next steps walk the totals and the transactions.

The ledger totals

Total Debit, total Credit, and the resulting Balance for this account across the shown period. Admins can also toggle "Include closed periods" to bring sealed fiscal-year rows into view for audit. Report Center prints/exports the ledger.

The transactions

One row per GL movement: TX# · date · description, the allocation refs (Order / Shipped-Order / Bill — each a link to its source document), the COUNTER account (click it to jump to the other side of the entry), the raw + currency + rate + Debit / Credit, and the running Balance. A PARENT account instead shows per-child buckets — drill into a child for its transaction detail.

Journals vs Opening Balances

Two tabs. JOURNALS (here) is the day-to-day manual double-entry ledger. OPENING BALANCES is a separate one-time surface for the balances you carried in at go-live, reconciled against the Opening-Balance Control account — the tour visits it at the end.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific to Journals: filters by branch, currency and a date range, plus Post All Drafts and New Journal. Owner-scoping applies throughout — you edit, post and delete your OWN journals, while a Finance ADMIN can act on anyone's.

Include closed periods

Finance ADMINs only: journals dated inside a closed accounting period are hidden by default (the period is locked). Toggle this to bring them into view for audit or research — they stay read-only.

Post All Drafts

Posts every journal that has at least one draft line you're allowed to post, in one batch — a pre-post preview opens first. The button shows the count and is hidden when nothing qualifies.

New Journal

Opens the New Journal Entry form (walked next). A journal is created as a DRAFT — nothing hits the ledger until you Post it from its row.

⤢

New Journal Entry

The tour opened the New Journal form. You set a date and description, optionally pick a template, then add one or more debit/credit LINE pairs. Save Draft stores it (no GL impact) — you post it afterwards from the list. The next steps walk each part.

New — Date · Description · Template · Owner

Date drives period gating; Description is required and shows on every posting. Template pre-fills the lines for a common entry (Bad-Debt Write-off, Inventory Adjustment, Petty Cash, Accrual, …) so you only fill the other side. Owner (Finance ADMIN only) can assign the journal to another employee.

New — the debit/credit lines

Each row is ONE balanced pair: a DR account, a CR account, an Amount, its Currency (rate auto-fills from settings, and the account's own currency is enforced), and the local value. The same amount debits the DR account and credits the CR account — so every line, and the whole journal, is balanced by design. Enter on the last line's amount adds another line.

New — Add Line

Adds another debit/credit pair (it inherits the previous line's accounts + currency to speed up repetitive entries). A journal can carry as many line pairs as you need.

New — Save Draft

The summary shows the line count, the running local total, and the "DR = CR (balanced by design)" badge. Save Draft stores the journal with NO ledger impact — it lands in the list as a draft, where you review it and click Post (with the pre-post preview) to push it to the GL.

The totals strip

Counts of Draft / Mixed / Posted journals (mixed = some lines posted, some still draft), the total DR and CR in local currency for the current view (always equal on balanced journals), and a per-currency raw breakdown — with an OFF flag if any currency's DR and CR don't match.

The journals list

One row per journal: J# · date · description · line / draft / posted counts · the distinct DR and CR accounts (each a ledger link) · DR and CR totals · currencies · a balance check · branch · owner · status. Click a row to open its detail below.

A journal — the drill

The tour opened the journal with the most lines. It shows the header, the debit/credit lines, and the buttons that act on it (Post drafts / Report Center). Editing happens right here — click any line to open its editor. The next steps walk the lines and the actions.

The journal's lines

One row per line: the DR and CR accounts (each a link into its ledger), the raw amount + currency + rate, the local DR / CR, the TX# once posted, and a Draft/Posted status. CLICK a line to edit it (drafts edit in place; editing a POSTED line atomically reverses its transaction and re-posts the new values). Draft lines have a trash icon; totals sit at the bottom.

⤢

Post the draft lines

Posts this journal's DRAFT lines to the GL in one action — a pre-post preview opens first so you confirm the exact debits and credits. Already-posted lines are untouched; the button says how many drafts it will post.

Add a line

Adds another debit/credit pair to an existing journal using the inline line editor — pick the DR and CR accounts, amount, and currency, then save it as a draft. Use it to extend a journal after creating it, then post the new lines.

⤢

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. This is the record-level one: it reports THIS journal as a T-account view — DR/CR accounts, amounts, TX#s. The toolbar's Report Center does the same across the whole filtered list.

Opening Balances

The tour switched to the Opening Balances tab — where you enter the balances each account carried at go-live, posted against the Opening-Balance Control account (which nets to zero when the migration is complete). It's a one-time setup surface kept out of the day-to-day journals. It has its OWN help topic with a full walkthrough (the register, the entry form, and the guided go-live wizard) — open "Opening Balances" in the help menu for that tour.

⤢

The OB Control meter

The heart of the page. Every opening balance posts its other leg against ONE Opening Balance Control account — so once every account is entered correctly, that account's net is ZERO. This card is the live meter: green ("complete & consistent") at zero, amber ("an account is missing or an amount is wrong") otherwise, with account counts, DR/CR totals, and a per-currency breakdown (each currency should also net to zero). It's not a gate — every single entry is balanced by design — it's the at-a-glance proof the whole opening trial balance is right.

⤢

The entry form

The single editor for opening balances (there's no grid editing — everything flows through here). Pick an account + currency + branch and it AUTO-LOADS any existing entry to edit, or blanks for a new one; clicking a row in the register below loads it here too. Title shows whether you're setting a new balance or editing OB #N.

⤢

Account · currency · side · amount

Branch (opening balances are per branch — the picker navigates the preset slices), the real Account, its Currency, the SIDE (Debit for assets, Credit for liabilities/equity), the Amount (0 clears it — records are permanent), and the exchange Rate for foreign-currency openings. You enter one amount and one side; that's the whole entry.

⤢

How it posts

The "POSTS AS" line shows the double entry your amount produces: Debit the real account / Credit the Opening Balance Control (or the reverse for a Credit-side opening). This is why a single amount is always balanced — one leg is your account, the other is always the OB Control. The local value is shown at the chosen rate.

⤢

Set / Update — and freezing

Save inserts the opening balance or updates the existing one in place (no duplicates, no reversal chain); 0 clears a leaf. Once an account has started trading — it has real postings, or its fiscal year is sealed — its opening FREEZES and can't be edited here; you correct it with a current-period journal entry instead. Admins can set an opening on another employee's behalf.

The register

A read-only row per opening balance — account, branch, currency, DR/CR amounts, local, the linked GL transaction, and a lock icon on frozen rows. It's cross-filtered live by the form's account/currency/branch, and clicking a row loads it back into the form. Zero (unfilled) rows render faintly so you can see what's still pending.

⤢

Filters & tools

Search by account or notes, filter by currency or date, and (admins) toggle Include-closed to see sealed-fiscal-year openings — past year one, this tab opens empty until closed periods are included, because go-live entries fall in a closed period once their year is sealed. Save View keeps your filters; Report Center prints / exports the register.

Guided go-live setup

For a first-time migration, this (admin) button opens a step-by-step WIZARD over the same data — a far faster way to enter a whole opening balance sheet than one account at a time. The tour opens it next.

The go-live wizard

The tour opened the guided wizard. It walks you through the opening balance sheet section by section, stages every figure without posting, and posts them all at once when you're ready — with the same OB Control meter at the top so you always see how close to complete you are.

Wizard — the sections

Five steps: Setup → Assets → Liabilities → Equity → Review. Each middle step is an editable grid of that section's accounts (Assets = what you own; Liabilities = what you owe; Equity = owners' stake — the one most often forgotten, which is what usually strands the control). Click a pill to jump; Back / Next move through them.

Wizard — import or type

On Setup you can Export the whole trial balance (a template with current values), fill it offline, and re-Import — matched rows STAGE into the section grids for review. Or just type each section's amounts directly. Either way nothing posts as you go: everything is staged first.

Wizard — stage, then Post all

As you enter figures they collect as "unposted changes staged" — Post all opens a preview that separates ready rows from blocked ones and requires a confirmation tick before it commits. The Review step shows whether the opening sheet balances; if it's off, it's almost always missing Equity. The year-end close stays blocked until the opening balances are complete.

Transaction types

Every posting carries a TYPE, colour-coded, and the chips filter to one — Purchase / Shipped_Out (an order line, active vs archived) · Service_fee · Shipping_bill · General_bill · Payment · Treasury · Payroll · Journal_entry · Opening_Balance · plus Reversal / Reversed for corrections. Each chip shows a live count; "All" clears the type filter. The count beside the title is the total in the current view.

⤢

The filters

Narrow the ledger by branch, currency (matches either the DR or CR side), account (picks from the chart — matches every TX touching it on either side), and a date range (defaults to the last 90 days to keep the fetch cheap). The search box does a free-text match across description / accounts (Enter runs it server-side). Save View keeps your combo for next login; Clear resets to defaults.

Include closed periods

Finance ADMINs only: transactions dated inside a closed accounting period are hidden by default (to declutter day-to-day work). Toggle this to fold them back in for audit — they render dimmed and stay read-only.

The totals banner

Computed over the currently-visible rows: total Local Debit and Local Credit, their difference (Balance — zero for a well-balanced ledger once all branches and periods are in view), and the raw debit / credit per currency before FX conversion. It re-scopes live as you filter.

The ledger

One row per transaction, both sides side by side: TX# · date · type · description, the source refs (Order / Ser / Shipped-Order / Bill — links to the document that created it), then the DEBIT side (account · raw · cur · rate · local) and the CREDIT side. Account numbers are links — click one to open that account's full ledger in the Chart of Accounts (Back returns here). The TX# column stays pinned as you scroll the wide table.

Flat vs Tree

Flat lists every transaction as its own row. Tree GROUPS them by source (Order / Shipment / Manual …) into collapsible sections with per-group DR/CR subtotals — handy for seeing everything one order or bill posted, as a unit. The tour switches to Tree next.

⤢

The grouped (Tree) view

The tour switched to Tree. Transactions now nest under group and subgroup headers, each with its own debit/credit totals; Expand All / Collapse All (beside the toggle) open or fold every group at once. It's the same rows as Flat, reorganised so a whole source document's postings read together. Switch back with the Flat toggle.

Report Center

See Introduction → Report Center for the full walkthrough. Here it reports the current filtered ledger — and offers raw CSV alongside print, Excel and PDF, because that is the form an auditor usually asks for.

The six statements

Each tab is a different report over the same ledger: Profit & Loss · Balance Sheet · Trial Balance · Cash Flow · FX Revaluation · Year-End Closing. They all work the same way — set the parameters, Run, read the drill-down tree, click any figure to open the GL. The tour walks each one's FORM control-by-control, RUNS it, and explains the result columns (which change per statement). Your active tab is remembered across a drill-and-back.

P&L — Period

Pick a Period preset (This Month / This Quarter / This Year / FY-to-date / Last Month …) or type custom From / To dates — editing a date switches the preset to "custom" so it sticks on Run. The P&L is always measured OVER A SPAN, so this range is what every figure covers.

P&L — Basis (Accrual / Cash / Both)

The recognition rule. ACCRUAL counts revenue when earned and costs when incurred (matching), regardless of cash. CASH counts them only when money actually moves. BOTH runs the two side by side so you can see the recognition gap — e.g. billed-but-unpaid revenue that accrual shows and cash doesn't. This toggle is unique to the P&L; the other statements don't offer it.

P&L — Comparison

Tick Comparison and pick a baseline (Prior period · Same period last year · custom dates). When it's on, every amount column SPLITS into three sub-columns — Current · Prior · Δ — and the Δ cell shows the change in amount and % with an up/down arrow, so you read growth or shrinkage on every line at a glance.

P&L — Branches

"All Branches" aggregates everything; click branch chips to pick specific ones (clicking a second adds it, clicking a selected one removes it). Select more than one and the table adds a COLUMN per branch plus a Total — so you compare how each branch contributed to every line, side by side.

⤢

P&L — Run · Saved Configs · % of Revenue

Run builds the statement (a busy overlay while it aggregates the GL). Saved Configs let you NAME a parameter set — period + basis + comparison + branches — and reload it in one click (handy for a recurring board pack). The "% of Rev" toggle adds a vertical-analysis column expressing every line as a percentage of total revenue.

⤢

P&L — the statement tree

The tour ran it. The body is a collapsible ACCOUNT TREE — Revenue and Expense groups you expand down to individual accounts; each cell stacks the per-currency raw amounts (with the post-time rate) above the local total, and group rows are bold and roll up their children. This same tree renders every statement; what changes per report is the COLUMNS — next.

P&L — the columns

By default the P&L splits each column into REVENUE | EXPENSE sub-cells (a row fills only its own side), and a NET column shows each row's signed contribution to Net Income (revenue +, expense −) — sum it down and you get Net Income. Turn Comparison on and the columns become Current / Prior / Δ instead; turn % of Revenue on and a final % column is added; pick several branches and you get a column set per branch. The header always shows which mode is active.

P&L — the accounting subtotals

Below the tree the statement's real structure is spelled out as running subtotals, each labelled with what it means: TOTAL REVENUE → COST OF GOODS SOLD → GROSS PROFIT (core trading margin) → TOTAL OPERATING EXPENSES → OPERATING INCOME → OTHER INCOME → NON-OPERATING EXPENSES → NET INCOME. Gross Profit and Net Income are the bold anchors; the rows between show exactly how you get from one to the next.

P&L — drill & disclosure

Every account line is a link — click it to open that account's ledger filtered to the same period (Back returns to the report). A disclosure note under the table explains how year-end closing entries (dated fiscal-year-end, moving temporary balances into Retained Earnings) and unrealised FX gain/loss appear in the P&L, and how to set the date range to view a year BEFORE vs AFTER closing.

Balance Sheet — parameters

The Balance Sheet is a POINT-IN-TIME snapshot, so instead of a date range you pick a single "Balance as of" date — the moment the position is measured. Tick Comparison to add a second "Compare to" as-of date and see the movement between the two. Branches filter as usual. It's accrual-only, so there's no basis toggle.

Balance Sheet — the statement

The tour ran it. The tree is the accounting equation: ASSETS = LIABILITIES + EQUITY. Assets roll up (cash / bank, receivables, stock, fixed assets), Liabilities (payables, loans, accruals), Equity (contributed capital + retained earnings). Current-period earnings roll into equity so the sheet balances as of the date. Rows expand to accounts and drill to the GL.

Balance Sheet — the columns

Each column splits three ways — ASSET | LIABILITY | EQUITY — and every row fills only its own side, so the whole statement lines up under the equation at a glance. With comparison on you instead see the as-of value against the compare-to value; with several branches, a set per branch plus a Total. There's no Net column — a balance sheet is a position, not a flow.

Trial Balance — parameters

A Period range (preset or custom) and an optional Comparison, filtered by branch — the same controls as the P&L but with NO basis toggle: the trial balance is a raw debit/credit movement report, not a recognition view. Run to build it.

Trial Balance — the proof

The tour ran it. Every account appears with its movement, grouped into the chart hierarchy. The trial balance is the arithmetic PROOF the double-entry books are consistent: total debits must equal total credits. If the bottom line is off, something is wrong at the source — fix it before you trust the P&L or Balance Sheet built on top.

Trial Balance — the four columns

This is a WORKING trial balance: each account (per branch) splits into four sub-columns — OPENING | PERIOD Dr | PERIOD Cr | CLOSING. Opening and Closing show the signed balance with an explicit Dr / Cr label; Period Dr and Period Cr show the gross movement on each side (per-currency chips + local total). So one row tells you where an account started, what moved through it, and where it ended.

Cash Flow — parameters

A Period range and optional Comparison, by branch. There's no basis toggle — Cash Flow is cash-basis by definition (it only tracks money actually moving). Run to build it.

Cash Flow — the statement

The tour ran it. The direct-method cash flow classifies every movement into OPERATING (day-to-day trading), INVESTING (buying / selling assets), and FINANCING (capital, loans), reconciling opening cash to closing cash for the period. It answers the question the P&L can't: "we booked a profit — so where did the cash actually go?"

Cash Flow — the columns

Each column splits into INFLOW | OUTFLOW — money in (green) vs money out (red) — for every classified line, so you see the gross movement both ways, not just a net. Line items drill to the underlying transactions behind them (a filtered GL view).

FX Revaluation Schedule

A period-end working — its own From / To dates, auto-loaded, grouped by period-end date. Each group lists every FX-revaluation entry (transaction, the DR / CR accounts, amount, currency, and whether it's a Gain or a Loss) with per-period Gain / Loss / Net totals. It's the evidence behind the unrealised-FX journal posted at each close (auto-reversed the next day) — review it before the period is sealed.

Year-End Closing Journal

The year-end working — its own From-FY / To-FY range, auto-loaded, grouped by fiscal year. Each year lists the closing entries that zero the P&L (revenue and expense) accounts into Retained Earnings: the DR / CR accounts, amounts (with currency + rate), and the Net to Retained Earnings (positive = net income, negative = net loss). A transparent, line-by-line view of exactly what the annual close does to the books.

The panel rail

The left sidebar lists every settings panel you're allowed to see — its icon, name, and a footer count of how many are available. Click its header to collapse it to an icon-rail (more room for the panel) or expand it back. On mobile it slides over the content. Clicking a panel opens it in the right pane.

Finding a panel — the search box

The search box sits in the page header (top right) and works whether the sidebar is folded or expanded. Type what you're LOOKING FOR, not what the panel is called — everyday words like tax, logo, smtp, permissions, backup, shifts, holidays, commission all land on the right panel, because every panel carries a vocabulary of its real functions alongside its name, description, module and sub-tabs. A dropdown lists the matches with each panel's icon, description and module; click one or press Enter for the first; Esc, the ×, or clicking elsewhere closes it. Searching never moves you — the open panel stays put until you pick a result.

The panels & their modules

One button per panel. The coloured chip on the right is its MODULE — SYS (system) · FIN (finance) · ORD (orders) · HR · LOG (logistics), or MIX for a panel that spans several. Sort the list by Name or by Module (the two headers above it). You only see a panel if you have access to its module; hover any button for a one-line description of what it configures.

⤢

The panel header & access

The active panel's header shows its icon, name, description, and module chip. If you have VIEW but not ADMIN on that module a "View Only" badge appears and every control is disabled — you can read the configuration but not change it. Deleting settings is stricter still (System-admin only on most panels). This same header sits atop every panel.

System & Finance panels

SYSTEM: Company Profile (branding on printouts) · Branches (offices that scope user access) · Countries · System / Dynamic Action Settings (notification + request workflows) · Access Rights (the permission matrix — assign module rights to job titles) · Retention & Prune · AI Assistant · Dashboard Metrics. FINANCE: Currencies & Rates · Cargo & Expenses (types + expense categories bills draw on) · Accounts Relations (maps business functions to GL accounts) · Service Fee Rules · Closed Periods (lock accounting months so nothing posts into them). Each has its own tour.

⤢

Orders, Logistics & HR panels

ORDERS / LOGISTICS: Lookup Values (the coloured classifications — Category / Sub-Category / Type — used across products, customers, vendors) · HS Codes (customs commodity codes) · Warehouses (storage locations tied to branches) · Shipment Documents (the B/L, EUR.1, C/O … catalog). HR (the payroll-setup backbone): Organization Structure · Pay Components (payslip line types) · Guideline Matrix (min/max pay bounds per title+grade) · Benefit Units Management · Jurisdictions (tax + SI per branch) · Pay Schedules. These drive slip generation on the Payroll page — and each has its own tour.

⤢

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: the search matches every column — function name, account number, account name. There is no Add button — the function list is seed-canonical and fixed in code, so you review the wiring rather than change it.

What this panel drives

Every automatic journal in the system resolves its accounts THROUGH this map. Sales, purchases, expenses, payroll — each posts to whichever account a function points at. Get the mapping right and the ledger self-maintains; that's why it's treated as canonical plumbing and changed only via a seed + migration, not a runtime button.

Mapping progress

The bar shows how many functions have an account assigned (e.g. 24 / 26). A fully-mapped set turns the bar green; any unmapped function is a gap where an automatic posting would have nowhere to land, so it doubles as an at-a-glance completeness check on your accounting setup.

The mapping table

One row per function: a status dot (green tick = mapped, amber ring = not yet), the function name, and the account number + name it resolves to. Unmapped rows are tinted so they stand out. The account number is a LINK — click it to jump straight to that account's own ledger (its running transactions), so you can see exactly what has posted through that mapping.

The panel & the auditor print

The header counts how many periods are closed and offers Print Schedule — a clean auditor deliverable listing every locked period with its date range, who closed it, when, and the note. This is the record you hand an auditor to show which months are sealed.

What a lock actually does

A closed period is a hard gate on the ledger: bills, payments, treasury, journals and payroll all refuse to post — or revert — anything dated inside a locked range. It's the mechanism that makes a reported month final.

The Closing Schedule

Sets WHEN each period becomes eligible to close (Finance ADMIN). Frequency can be Standard (each calendar month-end), Monthly (a shifted day-N), Quarterly, or Mid-year — and for the shifted modes you pick the closing day (1–28) of the period's last month. It's a UNIVERSAL gate with no admin bypass: to close earlier, you change the schedule (itself audited). The preview line spells out when the current sample period becomes eligible.

⤢

The Fiscal Year boundary

System-ADMIN only: which month the fiscal year STARTS in. That decides where the year ends — and the close of the ending month becomes the YEAR-END close (it posts the year-end journals and seals the year). Changing it re-bases every "This Fiscal Year" report across the app (dashboard, financial statements, allocations) and refreshes all logged-in users automatically.

⤢

The Closing Period Wizard

The server decides which period is next due (the earliest elapsed month with activity) — the operator never picks. The wizard is a 5-step flow that revalues FX, runs the year-end close when the period is the fiscal year's last month, sweeps up drafts, and finally applies the lock. You can open it anytime to INSPECT exposure, drafts, and balances; only the final Lock step commits, and only when the period is actually due.

⤢

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: the search covers every column — year, month, who closed it, note. There is no Add — periods are closed through the wizard, not typed in.

The closed-periods table

One row per locked period: the period label, year, month, the exact locked date range, when it was closed and by whom, and the audit note. For a System ADMIN each row also carries Reopen — a guarded, audited action that unlocks the month again (and, for a fiscal-year-end, un-posts its year-end journals and merges the sealed year back).

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific to Currencies: Update Rates from Internet. There is no Add button — currencies are seed-canonical, because the world list is fixed.

Update rates from the internet

Fetches live exchange rates from an online source (Finance ADMIN). It doesn't apply them blindly — a preview panel lists every fetched rate showing what changed, and you click Apply All (or Dismiss) after reviewing. Every rate is expressed against your local currency.

The currency table

One row per currency: a colour swatch + the code in its own colour, then code · name · country · the exchange rate (the local currency shows 1.000000 in green) · the LOCAL marker or a Set-Local button · an Active tick · Edit. The colour is what tints that currency everywhere it appears in the app.

Local currency & per-row actions

Exactly ONE currency is LOCAL — the base every rate and every report is measured in. "Set Local" switches it (only while no transactions reference a currency yet). Edit opens the record; there is no delete — historic transactions reference currencies, so retiring one is a seed + migration job, not a button.

⤢

The edit form

The tour opened a currency's edit form. Code / country / name are LOCKED (seed-canonical) and greyed out; a Finance ADMIN edits the rest. The next steps walk each editable field.

Exchange Rate

How many of your LOCAL currency equal one of this currency. Everything foreign is measured against it, and it's what auto-fills when someone picks this currency on an order or bill. "Update Rates from Internet" on the toolbar sets these in bulk; here you fine-tune one.

⤢

Active & Local

Active decides whether the currency shows in dropdowns at all — your plan CAPS how many can be active, so you switch on just the ones you trade in. Local marks the ONE base currency (always active, rate 1); only one currency can hold it, and it can only change before transactions exist.

⤢

Display Colour

The colour this currency is tinted in EVERYWHERE it appears — amount chips, ledger, reports. Pick it with the swatch or type a hex; the live preview shows the badge. It's the single source of truth for the currency's colour across the app.

Save

Save writes the change and every currency dropdown, rate lookup, and colour badge across the app picks it up immediately. Cancel discards it.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: the count states how many rules there are AND how many cargo types they cover, Report Center prints the full tier table with totals, and Add Rule is Finance ADMIN only.

Add a rule

Add Rule (Finance ADMIN) opens a blank fee-rule form. A new rule takes effect on the NEXT order created for its cargo type — the order module reads these tiers live, so there's nothing to publish.

How the tiers work

The rule that applies is chosen by cargo type, then by PRIORITY (lowest number checked first), then by the order value it kicks in at. Once a rule matches, the fee is the formula: Fee = max(order value × Fee %, Min Fee) — so the percentage applies, but never below the floor.

The tiers, grouped by cargo type

Each card is one cargo type; inside it the tiers are laid out in priority order. Every tier shows its priority badge, description, a bar marking the order-value threshold it starts at, the Fee %, and the Min Fee (in its currency). It's a visual read of the whole fee ladder. On each tier a Finance ADMIN gets Edit, and a System ADMIN also gets Delete.

⤢

The rule form

The tour opened a fee rule's form. It captures what the tier is, which cargo it applies to, when it's checked, and the fee maths. The next steps walk each field.

Description

A short label for the tier — e.g. "Small orders" or "Bulk freight". It's what you (and the report) read to tell tiers apart; it doesn't affect the calculation.

⤢

Cargo Type

Which cargo this tier applies to. Leave it "All Types" for a catch-all rule, or pick a specific cargo so this ladder only governs that kind of shipment — that's what groups the tiers into the cards you saw.

Priority

The order rules are checked in, LOWEST first. When several tiers could match an order, priority breaks the tie — so put your most specific / narrowest tiers first and your catch-all last.

⤢

The fee maths

Three fields together define the charge: Min Order Value (the threshold the tier starts applying at), Fee % (the percentage of order value taken), and Min Fee (the floor). The engine charges max(order value × Fee %, Min Fee) — the percentage, but never less than the floor.

⤢

Currency

The currency the Min Order Value and Min Fee are expressed in. It defaults to your local currency; set it to match how you quote the threshold and floor for this tier.

⤢

Effective window

Optional From / To dates that bound when the rule is live. Leave From blank for "always active" and To blank for "ongoing" — use them to schedule a rate change or retire a tier without deleting it.

Save

Save Rule writes the tier; Cancel discards it. The order module picks it up immediately, so the next order for that cargo type is priced by the updated ladder.

The two views

A switcher toggles between the Authorization Matrix (the grant grid) and the Permissions Catalog (the master list of module + permission pairs). Report Center prints / exports whichever view you're on, and reload refetches. The tour walks both views in turn.

The Authorization Matrix

A cross-grid of every active job title (rows) against every permission (columns), grouped by module — Orders, Finance, HR, Logistics, System and the counterparty modules. A tick means that title holds that permission. The title column and the header stay pinned as you scroll, so you never lose your place in a wide grid; hover a module header for what it covers.

⤢

Editing & saving grants

Ticking or unticking a box doesn't hit the server immediately — edits collect as PENDING (a count and a row highlight show which titles changed), so you make a batch of changes and then click Save once. Save applies only the titles that genuinely changed, and the employees under those titles are notified via the Action Center. Discard throws the pending edits away.

⤢

The Permissions Catalog

The master list of module + permission pairs — the building blocks the matrix is made of (e.g. FIN · VIEW, ORD · EDIT). Each row shows how many titles currently use it; a permission that's in use can't be deleted until it's removed from those titles first. Hover a module chip for its meaning.

Add a permission

The add row (HR ADMIN) creates a new module + permission pair — type or pick a module code and a permission code. Once added, it becomes a new column available to grant in the Authorization Matrix.

Edit a permission

The tour opened a catalog entry's edit form — you can rename its module or permission code. Because grants reference this entry, editing it re-labels that column everywhere it's used across the matrix. Save writes it; Cancel discards.

The four catalogs

The chips switch between Job Families, Job Titles, Grades, and Title ↔ Grade. They build on each other left-to-right: families contain titles, grades set the pay ladder, and the last chip maps the two together. The tour walks each in turn.

Job Families

The top-level groupings — e.g. Finance, Sales, Operations, HR. Each is just a code + name (and an active flag), and it's the PARENT of Job Titles, so it's the first thing you set up. Add / Edit / Delete from the toolbar; the code locks once created so references stay stable.

Job Titles

The actual positions (e.g. Finance Manager, Sales Rep), each belonging to one family. A title is what carries an employee's ACCESS RIGHTS (via the Authorization Matrix) and what the Title ↔ Grade chip pairs with grades. Add a title by picking its family, then a code + name.

Grades

The seniority / pay levels — G1 (entry) up through the senior grades — where the LEVEL number sets the ordering. Grades drive the Title ↔ Grade mapping and the Guideline Matrix bounds (the min / max for each pay component per title + grade), so they're the rung an employee's pay is anchored to.

Title ↔ Grade

The mapping that says which grades each title is allowed to hold (e.g. Finance Manager → grades 4–7), with ONE marked as the default. This is what constrains the Employee form's grade picker and scopes the Guideline Matrix. Tick the Default box to set a title's default grade; add a mapping from the row at the bottom.

The category rail

Down the left: the ten document categories (Commercial, Transport, Origin, Inspection, Treatment, Customs, Financial, Photos, Logistics, Other), each showing an active / total count. "All" gives the overview; picking a category jumps to its list.

⤢

The overview

The default "All" view — one card per category with its active / total count and a few of its active types, so you can see at a glance where your document coverage is set up and where it's empty. Click a card (or a rail item) to manage that category.

⤢

A category's types

Picking a category lists its document types. Each has a one-click Active toggle (the most common action — turn a type on to make it available to uploaders), a star marking the recommended set, its short-label chip, and its name. Click a row to expand its code, display order, and required fields.

Filtering the list

Above the list: an All / Active / Inactive filter, a "Recommended-25" toggle (the preset for the China / Egypt / Europe corridor), a search box over every column (code, name, short label, description, category…), and — for a Logistics ADMIN — Add to create a custom type in this category.

A document type

Each row is one type. The power button flips it Active / Inactive (active = it appears in the upload picker); the star flags whether it's in the recommended preset; expanding a row reveals its code, display order, and which fields (doc number, dates, issuer) it asks for. Edit opens the drawer; Delete (System ADMIN) is refused if any uploaded file already uses the type.

The add / edit drawer

The tour opened a type's drawer — it slides in from the right without dimming the list. It captures the code, short label, full name, category, description, display order, the required-field flags, and the active status. The next steps cover the two parts that matter most.

Required fields on upload

This block decides what the uploader is PROMPTED for when they attach a file of this type: a document number, an issue date, an expiry date (which drives the expiry badges in the drill), and an issuer. Tick only what this document genuinely carries, so uploaders aren't asked for fields that don't apply.

Save

Save writes the type (Cancel discards). A new or newly-activated type is immediately available in the Shipments Docs picker; the code is immutable once created, since uploaded files reference it.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: adding a warehouse immediately makes it available in the warehouse picker on receive and ship movements — there is no second step to activate it.

The warehouse table

One row per warehouse: id, a colour swatch, name (in its own colour), its home branch, the allowed-branches scope, country / province / city, and contact details — plus Edit (and Delete for System-admins). Sort any column; search filters live.

The warehouse form

The tour opened a warehouse's form (Edit a row, or Add Warehouse for a new one). It captures the name, home branch, colour, location, contacts, and which branches may use it. The next steps walk each part.

Warehouse name

How the warehouse is labelled everywhere — the picker on receive / ship movements, stock reports, order stamps. Required.

⤢

Home branch

The branch the warehouse primarily belongs to (required). It's ALWAYS allowed to use this warehouse — even in the specific-scope mode below, the home branch is mandatory and can't be unticked.

⤢

Display colour

The warehouse's tag colour, used wherever it appears (badges, stock columns) so locations are easy to tell apart. Pick with the swatch or type a hex; the chip previews it live.

Location

The address as a cascade — country → province → city (each narrows the next) — plus a map location and free-text address. It's where the warehouse physically sits, used on documents and geographic grouping.

Allowed branches

Which branches' orders may draw on this warehouse. Tick "All Branches" for any branch, or pick a specific set — the home branch stays mandatory. In specific mode the warehouse only offers itself to orders whose branch is in the list.

⤢

Save

Save writes the warehouse (Cancel discards). It's picked up immediately by every warehouse picker and the stock views.

The four catalogs

The chips switch between Benefit Units, Percentage Bases, Fixed Amount Bases, and Tiers. Together they define the UNITS a component's value is measured in and the BASES that percentage / fixed pay rules multiply against. The tour walks each.

Benefit Units

The unit catalog for info-kind pay components — days, money, percentage, text, bool. A component picks a unit so its value is interpreted correctly on a slip (annual leave in days, a medical plan in text). Seed-canonical — read-only.

Percentage Bases

The monetary values that PERCENTAGE rules in the Guideline Matrix multiply against — base salary, gross earnings, archived-orders value, service-fee revenue. "5% × orders value" gets its "orders value" from a basis here. Seed-canonical — read-only.

Fixed Amount Bases

The count-style values that FIXED-AMOUNT rules multiply against — order counts, per-employee or branch-scope. "$25 × own-orders count" gets its count from a basis here. Seed-canonical — read-only.

Tiers

Tier groups and their ranked tiers — the curated picker values for text info components (e.g. Medical Plan → Bronze / Silver / Gold / Executive). This is the editable catalog: add a group, then add its tiers, so admins control exactly what employees can be assigned.

The three tabs

Shipping Expenses, General Expenses, and Cargo Types. Shipping and General are Finance-only category → expense catalogs; Cargo Types (also open to Orders) defines the weights that split bill costs across a shipment. The tour walks Shipping, then Cargo Types.

Expense categories

The left panel lists the categories for this tab (e.g. freight, handling). Add / edit / delete them inline; click one to load its expenses on the right. Categories group the expense types so bills can pick from a tidy list.

Expenses in a category

The right panel lists the expense types inside the selected category — each with a name, description, active flag, and (for Shipping) a surcharge marker. These are exactly the lines a bill can add. Add and edit them inline; a category must be selected first.

Cargo Types

Each cargo type carries a colour and two allocation weights — CBM % (volume) and GW % (weight) — that MUST sum to 100%. When a bill's cost is distributed across a shipment's cargo, these weights decide the split. Finance ADMIN edits the weights; Orders ADMIN can add a name-only type (weights default to 50/50 for Finance to refine).

What this configures

The Dashboard shows headline metrics and alerts; this panel is where you set the numbers behind them. You don't add or remove metrics (they're a fixed registry) — you adjust the threshold that trips an alert, the colour it shows in, and whether a specific branch overrides the default.

The metric tables

Metrics are grouped by module (Orders, Finance, HR, Logistics, System). Each row shows its colour, label, description, data type, and severity (info / warning / critical) — those last three are fixed by the registry. The columns you CAN edit are inline: the colour swatch + hex, the alert threshold (for alert-type metrics), and a per-branch override so one branch can trip at a different number than the rest. Changes save on the spot and propagate to the Dashboard.

What a dynamic context is

An admin-defined request type. You give it a code + display name and a backing table; the app materialises the table automatically. It then appears in the New Request picker. Once any user submits one, its structural fields lock so live data can't be corrupted.

⤢

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: Add Dynamic Context, and no Report Center. The list shows each custom request type with its channel, module gate, assignee, approval mode, active state and an in-use lock.

The contexts table

One row per request type: code, display name, the notification channel it routes through, which modules can submit it, its assignee, whether it needs approval, active, and whether it's in use (locked). Click an editable row to open its drawer.

The context drawer

The tour opened a context. It captures identity (code / name / notification channel), who can submit it, who handles it, and its behaviour. The next steps cover the two workflow decisions.

Who can submit

The module gate. Leave it "All Modules" to let every authenticated user raise this request, or pick specific modules so only users holding one of those can submit — useful for keeping a finance-only or HR-only request type out of everyone else's picker.

⤢

Who handles this?

The assignee — the employee who receives the request in their Action Center inbox and by email. Filter by branch / department to find them. With no assignee it falls back to the channel's from-address; the toggles below add approval, manager CC, and requester visibility.

⤢

Save

Save writes the context (Create for a new one). It's live in the New Request picker for the modules you allowed. Cancel discards.

What the matrix guides

For each (Title × Grade) pair it stores a from–to range per eligible component. The slip generator no longer reads it directly — instead the Employee form and pay-line editor use these as the defaults and the bounds they validate against, so pay stays within policy for a person's title and grade.

The three views

By Title-Grade (one row per pairing, click Configure to set all its components at once), Matrix (a grid of pairings × components), and Flat List (every mapping as a searchable table). They're three lenses on the same data — the tour uses the By Title-Grade view.

By Title-Grade

One row per Title + Grade pairing (drawn from the Title ↔ Grade tab), showing how many components are mapped and a chip per mapping with its range. Configure opens a single form to set every eligible component's bounds for that pairing in one go.

The Configure editor

The tour opened the bulk editor for a pairing. Tick a component to enable it, then set its range — a numeric from–to (with currency) for pay lines, or a tier from–to for text info perks. It's split into pay-line and info sections; Save writes all the enabled rows and removes any you unticked.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the shared controls. This panel differs more than most: the search is cross-section, overlaying a flat result list over the whole tree, and there is CSV / TSV Import. There is no page count — you drill the tree instead of paging a list.

The section tree

Twenty-one sections; expand one to lazily fetch just its codes, then its chapters, then the heading / sub-heading codes underneath. Each row shows the dotted code, its description, and a level pill (chapter / heading / sub-heading). Click any code to edit it; a search of 2+ characters overlays a flat match list instead.

The guided Add builder

The tour opened the guided Add form. Rather than typing a raw code, you pick what you're adding and the parents, and the code is ASSEMBLED for you — chapter / section / level are auto-derived so you can't build a structurally invalid code.

Assemble the code

Pick the level (chapter / heading / sub-heading) and its parent(s), then type just the last two digits and a description. The preview shows the full dotted code it builds plus the section and level it lands in — all derived from your picks.

Add

Add writes the code into its section; if that section is expanded it refreshes in place. The code becomes available immediately in the HS-code pickers on products and packing lists.

What a jurisdiction owns

Each row is a self-contained regime: currency, tax method + modifiers, SI, holidays, annual + sick leave entitlement, and the attendance penalty scale. The slip generator does the cross-currency dance — tax / SI numbers are in the jurisdiction's currency; the slip line lands in the employee's salary currency. Leave and penalties are in fractions of a day, so they carry no currency and scale with any salary.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: each row surfaces its key calc settings on the table — tax base, tax-free threshold, SI base and ceiling — so you can read the shape without expanding it. Each row also has a Print that produces the whole rule set as one document, covered below.

The jurisdictions table

One row per jurisdiction: code, name, country, currency, tax method, and the slip-calc bases. Click the row's arrow to EXPAND its nested editors — tax, SI, holidays, Annual Leave, Sick Leave, and Attendance Penalties — which live inline. Click Edit to open the header drawer, or the printer icon for the dossier.

The jurisdiction drawer

The header form — identity, currency, tax method, and modifiers (the brackets / SI / leave / penalties themselves are edited in the expandable row sections). The next steps cover the header fields that changed recently.

Country & currency

Pick the country and the currency auto-fills from that country's primary currency (override allowed). Everything numeric denominated in tax/SI is in this currency; the slip generator converts through the local currency when it differs from the employee's salary currency.

⤢

Tax-free Threshold (was "Personal Allowance")

The first slice of income that is NOT taxed — subtracted from the taxable base before the tax method runs, in the jurisdiction's currency. It pays the employee NOTHING; it only reduces what's taxable. Renamed from "Personal Allowance" because everywhere else in this app an "allowance" is money paid TO the employee — the opposite direction.

⤢

Overtime Basis — Daily or Weekly

Daily (the default, Gulf/Egypt) = overtime is hours past the pay schedule's daily threshold. Weekly (US / FLSA) = overtime is hours past the WEEK's threshold, and that threshold DERIVES automatically as the schedule's working-days × its daily threshold (e.g. 5 × 8 = 40). You don't type a weekly number; switching this changes how every slip in the jurisdiction computes OT.

⤢

Annual Leave (expand the row)

Two parts. The POLICY (one per year) sets accrual — upfront (full allowance from Jan 1) or monthly (one twelfth per month) — plus the carry-over cap. The ALLOWANCE RULES decide HOW MANY days, as a condition table: each rule bounds experience / age / service (blank = any, upper bound exclusive) and grants a day count (blank = unlimited); several rules are alternative cases and the highest priority wins. An employee with no data on an axis counts as 0, so a junior floor band catches them. No rules = the leave-approval checkpoint has nothing to grant and approves all-unpaid.

Sick Leave (expand the row)

Also two parts. The CAPS (yearly + lifetime) decide how many sick days. The PAY CURVE decides how much of each day is paid: bands on the sick DAY NUMBER within the year (day 1–15 → 100%, 16–30 → 75%, …) → a paid percent; base stays full and the unpaid share is deducted. The day number is read from the attendance sheet, so it can't drift on a re-run. A day no band covers pays in full.

Attendance Penalties (expand the row)

Late arrival / early leave / absence, escalating by occurrence — and the occurrence counter resets each calendar MONTH. Two axes: which occurrence (1st, 2nd…) and how late in minutes; the outcome is a fraction of a day's pay. The shift the lateness is measured against, and its grace minutes, live on the Pay Schedule (an employee can override them). A 0-day penalty is a warning tier — it counts as an occurrence but costs nothing. No scale = nothing docked.

Print the rule set (the printer icon)

Each row's printer icon produces the complete jurisdiction as one document — profile, tax, SI, holidays, annual + sick leave, and penalties — from one read, so it's a consistent snapshot. An unconfigured section states its consequence (e.g. "no allowance rules → annual leave approves ALL-UNPAID") rather than printing blank. This is the auditor / labour-inspector view; it's visible even to read-only users.

Save

Save writes the jurisdiction header and refreshes it everywhere. You then expand its row to fill in the tax / SI / leave / penalty tables. Cancel discards.

Record retention floors

Inside the COMPANY jurisdiction's expanded row sits the Record retention grid — the legal floors, one row per record kind (Financial, Payroll, HR, Operations, Logs). A floor is the minimum number of years that class of records must exist before the platform's retention engine may destroy it; the Retention & Prune page inherits these numbers. Each row's source is yours: FOLLOW COUNTRY tracks the country's floor from Settings → Countries, SET HERE pins a custom figure — which may be SHORTER than the country's (against your own legal advice, and worth a note in the Notes field) but never LONGER: the statute is the ceiling, and the input refuses to exceed it. Edit any rows, watch them gain an edited chip, then save the whole grid with the ONE Save button (it names how many rows it will write and stops at the first refusal); Refresh discards unsaved edits. Only the company jurisdiction carries floors — other jurisdictions are tax scopes, not retention scopes, and show none by design.

What lookup values are

The dropdown values (with colours) that classify records everywhere — a product's category, a customer's area, a vendor's class. Editing one here re-colours and re-labels it across every page via a bootstrap refresh.

The four entity tabs

Products, Customers, Vendors, Contractors — you only see the tabs whose module you can view. Each entity uses its own set of fields (Products has the paired Category / Sub-Category plus Product Type and Units; the others are flat Area / Class / Type).

Category → Sub-Category

Products use a PAIRED layout: pick a Category on the left and its Sub-Categories filter in on the right. Add / edit either inline — value, colour, description, sort, and the SKU code. It's the only entity with this parent-child pairing; the rest are flat lists.

SKU scheme

You BUILD the scheme with pickers, not by typing it. Each part is a chip: a dropdown for which classification it takes, ◀ ▶ to move it, × to remove it. A part can appear only ONCE — the dropdowns offer only what is still unused — and a new part is added at the start OR the end, then moved with the arrows. The running number is fixed: it cannot be removed or turned into something else (it is what makes each SKU unique), only moved and resized by its digit count. One Separator picker sets what joins the parts, Cancel puts the saved scheme back, and the next SKU previews live as you change anything. Edit as text is there for a pattern the pickers cannot express (literal text, or different separators between parts) — such a pattern opens in the text box on its own, so it can never be silently rewritten. Either way what is stored is the same pattern string. Generated SKUs are composed from the product's classification under the pattern in this card — {CAT} category, {SUB} sub-category, {TYPE} type, {SEQ:N} a sequence of N digits — e.g. {CAT}-{SUB}-{SEQ:4} gives ELEC-LED-0042. The sequence restarts for every distinct prefix. Each segment is the SKU code set on the lookup value (Electronics → ELEC); with no code set, the first four letters of the value stand in. The preview shows the real next SKU for the pattern as you type; Save applies it to NEW products only.

A flat value list

The flat sections (Product Type, Units, Area, Class …) are simple tables: each row is a value with a colour swatch, description, and sort order, edited inline with Add / Edit / Delete. Sort order controls how the values appear in their dropdown.

Pay lines vs info perks

Every component is one of two kinds. A PAY LINE is money on the slip that hits the general ledger (earning / deduction / employer). An INFO PERK is display-only — a leave balance, a medical tier — with no GL impact. This one catalog holds both; the per-grade amounts live on the Pay Matrix.

⤢

Filter & add

A filter (All / Pay Lines / Info Perks), search, Report Center, and — for a System ADMIN — Add Component. The list is the whole catalog across both kinds.

The components table

One row per component: code, name, kind group, its payroll kind or value type, the DR / CR GL functions, the taxable and SI flags, and active. Click a row to edit it. Seed-canonical components (the ones the slip generator routes by) can be renamed and toggled but not deleted.

The component form

The tour opened a pay-line component. It captures what the line is, how it's categorised, and how it posts to the ledger. The next steps cover the two decisions that matter.

Kind group & payroll kind

Kind Group picks pay-line (money, hits GL) vs info (display-only). For a pay line, the Payroll Kind sub-categorises it — earning (base / allowance / overtime / commission), deduction (tax / SI / advance), or employer contribution — which is exactly what the slip generator routes by.

⤢

Save

Save writes the component. Its DR / CR functions map to accounts at post time (via Accounts Relations), and the taxable / SI flags decide whether it feeds the tax and SI calculations. Cancel discards.

What a schedule drives

A schedule is the rulebook the slip generator follows for the employees on it — it runs parallel cohorts (monthly, bi-weekly, …) and converts HR's attendance inputs into overtime earnings and deductions using the numbers you set here.

The Shift — and what it's for

Shift Start / Shift End / Grace are real clock times (the daily hours figure above is only a DURATION). They're what "late" and "early leave" are measured against for the attendance PENALTY scale (Settings → Jurisdictions → Attendance Penalties). Grace decides whether a lateness counts at all; the penalty band still sees the real minutes. Leave blank for no fixed shift — then lateness never fires (absence penalties still do). An employee can override the shift on their own record (morning vs evening staff on one contract).

⤢

Overtime — daily here, weekly is a jurisdiction rule

This schedule sets the DAILY overtime threshold (hours past it in a day are OT) and the multipliers. WEEKLY overtime is a jurisdiction choice (Settings → Jurisdictions → Overtime Basis): when a jurisdiction turns it on, the weekly threshold DERIVES from this schedule — its working-days × this daily threshold — so there's no separate weekly number to enter here.

⤢

Unpaid leave — follows the Base Method

There's no unpaid-leave-method setting: it's derived from the Base Method. An hourly-paid contract already excludes unworked hours from the base, so unpaid leave is NOT deducted again (no double-dock); a fixed or percentage salary doesn't react to absence, so unpaid-leave days are deducted per day. Absence and unpaid holidays always deduct regardless. (Unpaid-holiday treatment moved to each holiday's own paid/unpaid flag on the jurisdiction's Holidays panel.)

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: seed-canonical schedules can be edited, including deactivated, but never deleted.

The schedules table

One row per schedule: code, name, frequency, and its daily-rate method, plus active. Click a row to open its full rule set in the drawer.

The schedule drawer

The tour opened a schedule. It's a long form grouped into frequency, base calculation, rate, overtime, unpaid leave, and statutory withholding. The next steps spotlight the parts that most change pay.

Frequency & cycle

How often a period runs — Monthly, Bi-weekly, Weekly, or Custom — and the cycle mode: Continuous (back-to-back periods) or Rotational (work N units on, rest M off, for offshore / FIFO rosters). Period boundaries themselves come from the company Closing Schedule, not a per-schedule anchor day.

Overtime multipliers

One multiplier per premium context — overtime, weekend, holiday — applied PER HOUR at the day's rate, plus the daily OT threshold and an optional per-period cap (leave the cap empty or 0 for no cap). The generator turns the attendance sheet's hours into earning_overtime lines with these: hours past the OT threshold pay at the overtime multiplier; hours worked on a rest day or a public holiday pay at the weekend / holiday multiplier (a part-day earns a part premium). Hours SHORT of the standard day are docked at the plain rate.

Statutory withholding

Apply Tax and Apply SI decide whether the generator runs the tax-bracket and SI-rate calculations for this schedule's employees. Turn them OFF for freelancer / contractor schedules where the org doesn't withhold through payroll — no tax or SI lines are emitted.

Save

Save writes the schedule; the next pay run for its employees follows the updated rules. Cancel discards.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the shared controls. Specific here: there is no Add — the six notification centres are seed-canonical, so you configure the existing channels rather than create them. Each row can send a test email.

The channels table

One row per channel: its alias, the from-name / from-email, the SMTP host, active / default, and the "Routes For" cell listing every system context that sends through it. A green Send button fires a test email; clicking the alias (System ADMIN) opens the SMTP drawer; clicking a context in Routes For opens that context's drawer.

The SMTP channel drawer

The tour opened a channel's SMTP settings (System ADMIN). The alias is locked (seed-canonical); you set the from-name / from-email, host, port, user, password (write-only — leave blank to keep), and the TLS / SSL / active / default flags. This is purely email delivery.

A system context ("Who Handles This?")

The tour then opened a context that routes through the channel. Its identity is locked, but you set who handles it — the assignee who receives it in Action Center + by email — plus approval, manager-CC, visibility, and active. This is the workflow half, decoupled from SMTP so module admins can own it without touching mail config.

The master switch

The big toggle turns the assistant on or off for the whole workspace. Off, it's hidden for everyone regardless of their tier; on, users who've been assigned a budget tier see it. Remember to Save after flipping it.

Provider & model

Pick the LLM provider and model — choosing a model auto-fills its prices below. The credentials block underneath adapts to the provider (an API key, or AWS / Azure / Vertex fields); secret fields are write-only and stored encrypted. A Test-connection button makes a real 1-token call to prove the credentials authenticate.

Conversion rates

Three numbers turn tokens into money: the price per million input tokens, per million output tokens (both auto-filled from the model, override for negotiated rates), and your app's average tokens per message. Together they drive the $ / message estimate shown on every budget tier.

Tool calling — how the assistant's tools reach the model

The assistant works by CALLING the app: it searches the API, reads data and proposes writes through a gateway that checks the caller's own rights. Those tool definitions have to reach the model somehow, and there are two ways. NATIVE is the standard one — the provider's own tools API, a structured field beside the messages; every mainstream model wants this. IN-PROMPT writes the same definitions as TEXT in the system prompt and reads the calls back out of the model's reply. AUTO (the default) tries native and, if the provider answers nothing in the way that means it could not carry the tools at all, switches to in-prompt for the rest of that turn and retries — nothing is lost, and the failed round costs no tokens because the provider never processed it. Why this exists: a provider can advertise tool support and fail on it. One model returned an empty answer, zero tokens and an upstream error EVERY time tools were present, while four other models answered correctly on the same key and the same request — and the same model drove a desktop coding agent perfectly, because that agent puts its tools in the prompt. Nothing else changes between the two: the same gateway, the same rights checks, the same one-action-per-turn rule, the same audit trail and the same metering. Leave it on Auto unless you are diagnosing something.

Budget tiers

Named monthly buckets, stored in TOKENS, with the $ and message equivalents derived live from the rates above. Create the tiers here (Light / Standard / Power, say); then assign one to each employee on the Employees page → User Access tab. An employee with no tier doesn't see the assistant.

A tier

The tour opened a budget tier. It's just a name, a monthly token budget (with the live $ / message estimate), a sort order, and active. Save writes it; it becomes available to assign on the Employee User Access tab.

What your plan allows

The banner at the top is the whole entitlement in one line: whether the API is switched on for your plan, how many calls each key may make per minute and per day, and how many keys you have against your maximum. Read "10/min · 100/day per key" as exactly that — PER KEY, not shared. Two associates on separate keys cannot starve each other, so the worst your workspace can produce is your key count times the daily allowance. If the banner is amber, your plan has no API access and nothing on this page will issue.

Which address to send

The same key answers at four doors, and which one you send depends on what the associate opens. JSON is for Excel 2016 / 365 and Power BI — and for anything with an HTTP connector: Odoo, ERPNext, Zoho, SAP Business One, Dynamics 365, Make, Zapier, n8n. HTML is for Excel 2013 and older (those versions cannot read JSON at all and will SAVE it as a file instead of importing it, which is what "the link doesn't work" usually means) — and it is also what Google Sheets reads, through IMPORTHTML. CSV downloads the same rows as a ready-to-import file — the format every accounting package accepts: Kingdee, UFIDA, Qoyod, Daftra, Wafeq, QuickBooks, Xero — and Sheets IMPORTDATA reads it live. PORTAL is a web page — send the address and the key separately, and the associate needs no Excel at all. Every row in the grid carries a copy button for each format. All product names are their owners' trademarks, named here only to say what connects. A machine-readable OpenAPI spec of every address, parameter and format lives at /public-api/v1/openapi.json — paste it into ChatGPT Actions, Postman or Power Automate.

Use with ChatGPT

Give yourself — or any client — a ChatGPT that answers from live data: "which of my orders are still pending?", "what arrived this week?". The key row does the assembly: press GPT on the key you want to connect and its panel lays out the three pastes in the exact order ChatGPT's editor asks for them.

THE ONE TRAP, FIRST: an ordinary ChatGPT conversation cannot use the key. Pasting the key into plain chat does nothing — ChatGPT refuses, by design, to send credentials typed into a conversation — and the key then sits in that chat's history, so if you tried it, revoke that key and issue a fresh one. The key belongs in a custom GPT's Action settings, which is what the steps below build.

ONE — press GPT on the key's row, then Open the GPT editor (creating a GPT needs a paid ChatGPT plan; the people you share it with need none — a shared GPT works on free ChatGPT accounts). TWO — in the editor: Configure, then Actions, then Import from URL — paste the first line (the spec address). Set Authentication to API Key with type Bearer and paste the second (the key). Paste the third into Instructions so the GPT stays on its job. THREE — share the finished GPT's link with the person the key is scoped to, or keep it private. On its first question ChatGPT shows an Allow prompt naming your workspace — approve it once.

Know before you share: the GPT's link carries the key, so share it exactly as carefully as the key itself — and revoking the key kills that GPT's access at once. Every question spends calls from the key's daily allowance (watch Used today). Answers travel through OpenAI's servers. And the API is read-only: no GPT can change your records, whatever anyone types at it.

Ready-made automations (n8n · Make · Zapier)

Three ready-made n8n workflows turn the API into running automations — download, import, replace three placeholders, done. Each file lives on your own workspace at /integrations/: n8n-orders-alerts-wecom-dingtalk.json posts a summary of new orders (by order date) into a WeCom (企业微信) or DingTalk group — both robots accept the same message, so one template serves both, and it stays silent when nothing changed. n8n-shipments-asn-email.json mails each new shipment's carton list as a ready-to-import CSV — that file IS an advance shipping notice, and Cin7, Unleashed, Logiwa and Zoho Inventory all ingest it through their import screens. n8n-gl-csv-to-accounting.json mails the week's accounting entries every Monday as the CSV that Kingdee, UFIDA, Qoyod, Daftra, Wafeq, QuickBooks and Xero import directly.

To use one: in n8n choose Workflows, then Import from URL, and paste the file's address (your workspace address + /integrations/ + the file name). Open the sticky note inside — it names the three things to replace: YOUR-WORKSPACE, YOUR_API_KEY (issue it above; the note says which module), and the destination (robot webhook, or recipient + your SMTP details). Every poll spends one call of the key's daily allowance, so match the schedule to your plan. Make and Zapier users build the same flows with their HTTP modules — the same three steps: a schedule, a GET to the address the template shows, and the delivery.

Google Sheets & Looker Studio

A Google Sheet that refreshes itself from your data needs one formula — and Looker Studio charts plug into that sheet natively, which is the two-step path to live dashboards without Power BI. In any cell of an empty tab, paste (with your workspace and a key from above):

=IMPORTDATA("https://YOUR-WORKSPACE.theorder-erp.com/public-api/v1/orders?api_key=YOUR_KEY&format=csv")

That one line fills the tab with the module's rows and re-pulls roughly every hour and on open. The same formula serves every module — swap /orders for /inventory, /shipments or /gl/transactions — and accepts the same filters the API takes (add &status=Pending, &order_date_from=2026-01-01 and so on to the address). =IMPORTHTML("https://YOUR-WORKSPACE.theorder-erp.com/public-api/v1/orders?api_key=YOUR_KEY&format=html","table",1) does the same through the HTML door if IMPORTDATA is ever blocked. If the rows ever land in a single column, name the delimiter explicitly: =IMPORTDATA(the same address, ","). One page holds up to 1000 rows; for more, add &page=2 on a second tab. Make one tab per module, one sheet per audience — a customer-scoped key in a sheet shared with that customer is the same fence the portal enforces.

For Looker Studio: Create, then Data source, then the Google Sheets connector, pick the sheet and tab, and build — charts follow the sheet, the sheet follows the API. Know before you share: the key is VISIBLE in the formula to anyone who can open the sheet, so share the sheet exactly as carefully as the key, and revoke the key to cut the sheet off. Every refresh spends one call per formula from the key's daily allowance — a sheet with four module tabs spends roughly a hundred calls a day on Google's own refresh cadence.

Issuing a key

Choose the scope, choose the module, press Issue key. The key is shown once in full and stays retrievable from the grid afterwards, so losing the message does not force you to reissue and break a workbook already pointed at it. If the button refuses, it says why in place — plan limit reached, or a scope chosen without picking who it is for.

The scope is a FENCE, not a filter

This is the setting that matters. "All" means the key sees everything the module holds. Choosing Customer or Supplier and then naming one pins the key to that entity SERVER-SIDE: the condition is added to every query before it runs, so no parameter, no edited URL and no clever request can widen it. That is what makes it safe to hand a key to your client — they see their own orders and provably nothing of anyone else's. The list of types offered is not arbitrary either: only entities that can lead this module appear, which is why a contractor is not offered for Orders.

The key list

One row per key. The first column is the KEY itself, masked, with a copy button — not its hash, which authenticates nothing. Then the scope by NAME rather than an id, the module, the copy buttons for each address, today's usage, status, when it was last used and when it was created. A key issued before key storage existed shows an id instead and cannot be copied; reissue to get a usable one.

Used today

How many calls that key has spent since 00:00 UTC, against your plan's per-key daily allowance. It turns amber past 80% and red at the limit, so you can see an associate about to be cut off before they call you. The count lives with the key, not in memory, so a deploy or a restart does not hand everyone a fresh allowance. The associate sees the same figure in the portal. Opening the portal costs one call; filtering, sorting and refreshing the page cost nothing — only the portal's Refresh button asks the server again.

Revoking

Revoke kills the key immediately — the next request from Excel, Power BI or the portal is refused. Nothing is deleted: the row stays so you can see what existed and when it was last used. There is no un-revoke; issue a new key and send the new address. If a key's address has been forwarded somewhere you did not intend, revoking is the whole remedy, and it takes effect on the next call rather than at the next renewal.

Webhooks — a message when things happen

This part of the page sends NEWS out, so nobody has to come looking. Point it at a place — most simply a group chat in WeCom (企业微信) or DingTalk (钉钉) — and when one of four things happens (an order changed status, a shipment departed, a payment was posted, a shipment's document set completed), a short plain message lands there on its own. This tour walks every entry and button; read-only viewers get the reading half of it.

Start a channel

The + Add channel button opens the editor — the tour has opened it for you on this stop's panel. It only appears for users with System Edit rights; everyone else can read the rows and their health.

Where should the message go?

Pick the card that matches your situation. The first two are the chat groups — WeCom (企业微信) and DingTalk (钉钉) — same messages, pick yours. The third, My own system / another tool, is for when the news should reach software instead of a chat; it offers an optional secret that lets your system prove each message really came from your workspace. Not sure? Pick your chat app.

Paste the address

For a chat group: group settings → Group Robot (群机器人) → Add, then copy the robot's address and paste it here. The green check under the box confirms we recognised it (✔ WeCom group robot address / ✔ DingTalk robot address); an amber note means it doesn't look like a chat-robot address — for another tool's address, pick the third card above.

Name it for yourself

A label only you see — it shows on the row, so “Warehouse group“ beats “webhook 2” when three channels exist.

Choose the news

A chip with a checkmark is ON. Leave every chip off to receive ALL four news items, or tick just the ones you care about — the line under the chips always states what you'll get, so there is no guessing what “none selected” means.

Save it

Save creates the channel and closes the editor. Nothing is delivered yet — the next stops show how to prove the pipe with one test message, and how to read the row afterwards.

The channel row

One row per channel: its name, the kind (chat robot or your-system), the news it subscribed to (or All events), and the address — masked for read-only viewers, because a robot's address is itself a key.

Send test — the proof

One sample message, delivered through the same engine the real news uses. Watch it arrive in the group (or your system) within seconds; the verdict appears right here in the row. A test costs nothing and leaves no trace in the delivery list.

Health — is it working?

Delivering means the last message landed. Failing ×N counts consecutive failures — hover for the exact error. Never sent means just that. A failing channel is retried gently for a few hours, then held with its error on record — and it can never delay or break the order, shipment or payment that triggered the news.

Edit · Pause · Delete

Edit reopens this channel's card settings. Pause holds deliveries without deleting anything (the row dims; Resume brings it back). Delete removes the channel and anything still waiting in it — it asks first.

The registries

One row per registry. The badges say what it is: canonical (published by the platform, with its version), customised (your copy of a published one, with the version it was based on) or your own (a registry you added). Then which GS1 PREFIXES it answers for — the first three digits of a code name the registry: 690–699 is China, 000–139 the US and Canada, 400–440 Germany, and so on — and its priority: when several enabled registries serve a prefix, the lowest number is asked. A keyed registry shows key set / no key; a keyless one shows on / off. 'unverified' marks a definition written from the registry's published documentation that has not yet been seen answering live — Test it with your key. 'platform updated to vN' on a customised row means the published definition moved on since your copy: compare and adopt, or keep yours. A red or orange badge with a count is the drift alarm (below).

Keys and switches

Paste the registry's API key and Save key — it is stored encrypted and never shown again; the row only ever says 'key set'. Remove key forgets it and the registry goes off. A keyless registry has Switch on / Switch off instead. The key you paste is YOURS: bought from that provider, billed by them. A workspace with no key and no switch on asks nobody and spends nothing — the product form says 'no registry is enabled for this prefix' and points here.

Test — one credit, raw beside mapped

Type or scan a barcode and Run test: the registry is called once through this row's definition, bypassing the cache, and you see the outcome (found · not found · bad key · quota · map stale · provider error), the exact URL that was called with the key redacted, the MAPPED fields the definition produced, and the registry's RAW answer underneath. That side-by-side is how you tell a registry that has no such product from a registry that changed its answer's shape: the raw body is full but the mapped side is empty.

Customise, add, re-map

A registry definition is DATA, not code: where to call (transport — URL, method, where the key goes), how to tell success from not-found (envelope), which field of the answer feeds which product field (map, as dotted paths like items[0].title), and which prefixes it serves (routes). Customise opens your copy as JSON; Save as my copy makes it an override that wins over the published one for this workspace; Back to published drops it. Add provider creates a registry the list never had — the same JSON, with a code of your own. Re-map cache replays every cached answer of a registry through the current definition without calling anyone: after a fix to the map, yesterday's answers are re-read for free.

The drift alarm

Registries change their answers without notice. Every real call classifies its outcome, and the last non-found outcome stays on the row as a badge with a streak count and the message: bad key or quota is about YOUR key or plan; map stale means the registry answered but the definition mapped nothing — its JSON changed — and provider error means it did not answer at all. A found answer clears the badge. A map-stale or provider-error on a platform-published definition is also reported to the platform, one row per workspace and registry, so the published definition can be fixed once for everyone; nothing is ever polled — the alarm exists only because someone scanned something.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. This is the plain settings row with nothing added: count, search, Report Center, reload, Add Branch. Nearly every Settings panel repeats it, so it will feel familiar across the whole section.

The branch table

One row per branch: ID · a colour swatch · name (shown in its own colour) · company · country / province / city · contact · phone · email, plus the row actions (Edit, and Delete for System-admins). Sort any column; the search box filters live.

Add a branch

Add Branch (System ADMIN) opens the form for a new location. A new branch immediately becomes available in every branch picker across the app, and can then be granted to users in the Access Rights panel.

The branch form

The tour opened a branch's form (Edit on a row, or Add Branch for a new one). It captures the name, colour, address, and contacts. The next steps walk each part.

Name & company

The Branch Name (required) is how the branch is labelled everywhere — pickers, stamps on orders / bills / stock, reports. Company Name is the legal entity it trades as, shown on that branch's printouts.

Display colour

The branch's tag COLOUR — used everywhere the branch appears (badges, columns, charts) so you can tell branches apart at a glance. Pick it with the swatch or type a hex; the chip previews it live.

Location

The geographic address as a CASCADE — country → province → city (each narrows the next), plus a map location and a free-text address line. It sets where the branch physically is, used on documents and for geographic grouping.

Save

Save writes the branch (Cancel discards). The change propagates through every branch picker and colour map in the app; a brand-new branch can then be granted to users in Access Rights.

The logo

Drop or click to upload the company logo. It's shown in the app header and on printouts; you can change or remove it. It uses the same attachment store as employee photos.

⤢

Name & slogan

The company name (required — shown everywhere), an optional secondary name (e.g. Arabic / Chinese), and a slogan / tagline. These are the words that head every document.

⤢

Address

The company address as a cascade — country → province → city — plus postal code and address lines. The country here also drives the active data-retention floor (via Settings → Countries).

⤢

Contact & registration

Phone, fax, email, website, plus the tax ID and registration number — the registration details that appear on invoices and official printouts.

Header font style

How the company name renders on headers and printouts — font family, size, weight, style, and colour. A live preview below shows exactly how the header will look before you save.

Save & letterhead

Save writes the profile and every module header + printout picks it up right away. Letterhead prints a sample so you can check the branding. Reset reverts unsaved edits.

The toolbar

See Introduction → The toolbar for the count, the two-mode search box and the circular arrow. Specific here: the list ships pre-loaded with the full world list, so you will rarely add a country and mostly review.

The country table

One row per country: id, name (the home country carries a HOME badge), ISO code, phone code, and its retention floor in years. The page is VIEW AND PRINT ONLY — the list comes from the world seed, and nothing here is edited by the workspace. Use the toolbar to search, sort, refresh, and print the list.

Retention floor & home country

The floor is the legal minimum number of years this country's records must exist before the platform's retention engine may destroy them — it feeds every follow-country row in Settings → Jurisdictions → Retention. Only the platform can move a floor (contact support if the statute changed). The HOME country is stamped once, when the workspace is provisioned — it decides which country's law governs your books and it never moves; a wrong one is a support case, not a settings edit.

The prune engine's state

Three states — OFF: nothing is archived or deleted. REPORT: the engine works out exactly what it WOULD archive or delete and records it, touching nothing. ACT: it archives partitions past their soft floor and deletes archives past the legal floor, for real and permanently. The state is SET BY THE PLATFORM — TheOrder operates the retention engine as storage policy, and the standard state is ACT: aged records are archived to cold storage (still downloadable below) rather than kept in the live database. Your page shows the current state read-only; any change the platform makes is written to your audit log. Contact support if your business needs a different setting.

The run history

Every ACT pass keeps its own row forever — those changed data, so they are evidence. The REPORT is a single always-current row, rewritten each time it runs, because a report is recomputable and only the latest one answers anything. Each row shows what the pass archived, destroyed, pinned and kept. The engine runs once per fiscal year, at your company's own year turn — and a run that stopped at its per-run limit or failed does NOT count as done; the next daily pass continues it, and the Outcome column says so. Click a row to open the run's full report: the engine REFUSES rather than filters, so every month it declined to touch is listed with its stated reason — a live request still in progress, an open pay period, the legal floor. The routine verdicts (not old enough, the live catch-all, the two sealed tables) are counted rather than listed, and the counts plus the listed rows add up to every partition examined.

Run a report by hand

Run report now works out exactly what the engine would archive or delete and records it in the history — touching nothing, whatever it finds. Safe to press any time, whatever the engine's state, and the way to see what the next scheduled run will do before it happens. Acting is not a button here: the engine is operated by the platform, and real archiving and deletion happen on its yearly schedule.

Soft vs hard floors

Two thresholds per table. SOFT = archive at the global floor: the partition is written to storage, read back and checksum-verified, recorded, and only then dropped from the database — the record survives, so a retention obligation is still met. HARD = destroy: at the destroy age the archive itself is deleted, which cannot be undone — for every row. Data that reaches the destroy age never having been archived (old records at first enablement) is archived on that pass and destroyed on a later one, so nothing is ever destroyed that was not archived at least once. The two ages are gated both ways: the destroy age can never be BELOW the legal floor for the record kind (inherited from Settings → Jurisdictions → Retention), and the archive age can never EXCEED the destroy age or that floor — records leave the live database no later than the law's minimum retention.

The policy table

One row per partitioned table (or account prefix): its kind, its UNIT, and the soft and hard ages. The Unit column answers WHEN a slice becomes prunable — the engine itself passes once per fiscal year for every row, but what it can drop differs: a FISCAL YEAR table is sealed by the FY-end close (closing a year carves that year out of the live data; an unclosed year cannot be pruned), while a MONTH table seals on its own as the calendar rolls, no close involved. Click a row to edit its floors — or use SET ALL TO FLOOR to make every destroy age exactly its legal floor in one click (including lowering rows scheduled to keep records longer; archive ages above a new destroy age come down with it): records are then destroyed at the earliest moment the law allows, which keeps the database smallest. Below this sit the read-only Backups and Restore-log catalogs the engine populates.

The policy drawer

The tour opened a policy row. It shows the table and its record kind, then the two ages — and only ONE is yours: the ARCHIVE age, gated both ways (never past the record kind's legal floor, never past the destroy age). The DESTROY age is shown read-only as platform policy — it is moved only by the platform's own levers: the seed, the self-repair on opening the page, and Set all to floor. And if a legal floor is CHANGED after rows were set, opening this page as System ADMIN self-repairs them: ages out of bounds are pulled back in, listed in an amber bar, and written to the audit log — the engine was never going to break the law, but the numbers shown must be the schedule that runs.

Save

Save writes the policy. Nothing is archived or destroyed by saving — this only defines the floors, and whether the engine acts on them at all is the mode switch at the top of the page. Cancel discards.

Downloading an archive

Every archived partition in the Backup catalog can be downloaded as xlsx or pdf. The archive itself is stored once, raw and exact; the server converts it on the way out, and in the spreadsheet every cell arrives as exact text — a code like 0031 stays 0031, long numbers keep every digit, dates are not reinterpreted by Excel's locale. The pdf is a fixed, paginated document for reading rather than working with. System ADMIN only — an archive is the ONLY remaining copy of pruned records — and every download is written to the audit log. An archive whose row says DELETED was destroyed at the legal floor and cannot be downloaded by anyone: that is the point of the hard floor, not a failure.