Getting Started

Welcome to the SikaBooks Accounting Module. This manual covers the live accounting workspace as it currently runs in SikaBooks for Ghanaian businesses.

SikaBooks provides accounting records, controls, and reporting tools that assist IFRS- and Ghana-oriented workflows. It does not guarantee IFRS, GRA, tax, or legal compliance; businesses should verify statutory rules and professional judgments with qualified advisers.

1.1 What Is SikaBooks Accounting?

SikaBooks is an IFRS-oriented accounting workspace built for Ghanaian businesses. It handles customers, invoices, bills, payments, bank reconciliation, Ghana tax workflows, financial reporting, audit trails, and period close controls inside a secure multi-business environment.

1.2 Navigating the Sidebar

The Accounting sidebar groups features into these sections:

• Dashboard — KPI overview, trends, tax snapshot, bank visibility, and recent activity
• Sales — Customers, Invoices, Batch Invoices, Payments Received
• Purchases — Vendors, Bills, Batch Bills, Payments Made, Bulk Bill Payments
• Projects — Projects workspace with dashboard and profitability actions when Projects is enabled
• Banking — Bank Accounts, Transactions, Reconciliation
• General Ledger — Chart of Accounts and Journal Entries when Advanced Accounting is enabled
• Reports — Financial statements, aging, tax reports, and FX Exposure when Reports is enabled
• Tax & Compliance — Approvals, Ghana Tax, Period Management, and Compliance depending on enabled features
• Settings — Accounting Settings and Accounting Tags when Tags is enabled
• Help — User Manual

Purchase Orders no longer live inside Accounting. If the Procurement module is enabled, they are managed from the Procurement workspace.

1.3 Using Global Search

The search bar at the top of the page lets you search across accounting customers, vendors, invoices, bills, projects, journal entries, and bank transactions. Type at least two characters to see grouped results.

1.4 Quick Create

The Quick Create button lets you create common records without leaving the current screen:

• Invoice or Quick Invoice
• Customer
• Bill or quick expense entry
• Vendor
• Project when Projects is enabled
• Payment received
• Journal entry when Advanced Accounting is enabled

1.5 Projects

Projects are separate from whole-accounting budgets.

Use Projects to track jobs, customer engagements, or internal initiatives inside Accounting without turning on whole-accounting budget workflows.

Projects use base-currency profitability from linked standard invoices and bills.

Current v1 scope:

• Only standard invoices and standard bills can optionally link a project
• Archived projects remain visible on already-linked historical documents
• New links to archived projects are blocked

Quick create, batch processing, journals, payments, bank transactions, and checks are excluded from project linking in v1.

This release is intentionally about job-costing and profitability, not fiscal-year budgeting or budget-vs-actual reporting.

When Projects is enabled, Accounting also adds:

• A Project Dashboard for project counts, activity, and base-currency profit leaders
• A Project Profitability report with project, customer, and status filters plus CSV export

1.6 Tags

Tags are a separate lightweight classification layer inside Accounting.

Use Tags when you want reusable labels such as branch, event, campaign, fund, channel, or internal grouping without turning those labels into Projects.

Current v1 scope:

• Tags are Accounting-only and separate from CRM tags
• Tags can be assigned to standard invoices, standard bills, manual journal entries, and bank transactions
• Bank import review supports assigning tags before staged rows are committed
• Filters support tag selection on invoice, bill, journal, bank transaction, and general-ledger screens
• Archived tags remain visible on already-tagged historical records, but cannot be newly assigned

Tags do not change posting logic, tax logic, approvals, or profitability calculations. They are for filtering, grouping, and operational classification only.

1.7 Business Modes

Accounting includes visibility presets called Business Modes:

• Starter — Minimal accounting workspace for smaller teams
• Growth — Adds broader operational visibility
• Professional — Exposes approval, audit, and close workflows
• Enterprise — Keeps the full workspace visible

Business mode affects default feature visibility. It does not delete or rewrite your data. A user with Accounting Settings access can change this in Accounting Settings > Features & Modules and override individual feature toggles.

1.8 Accounting Dashboard

The Accounting dashboard is the operational summary page for the module.

It currently provides:

• KPI cards for cash, receivables, payables, and profit / net income
• Period-based views with comparison trends
• In fuller modes, action items, 30-day insights, mini profit-and-loss and cash-flow views, receivables and payables aging, invoice and bill pipeline summaries, bank account balances, Ghana tax summary, top counterparties, product highlights, and recent activity

If Simple Mode is enabled, the dashboard keeps a lighter version of this workspace with fewer drill-down panels.