Ambrook is a suite of financial management tools for many different aspects of your operation, but the heart of it all is easy bookkeeping. This article will get you acquainted with the basic bookkeeping flow that will power your other business operations on Ambrook.

The Ledger is where all of the transactions from your linked financial accounts stream in. It’s also where Cash Transactions, Expected Invoice Payments, In-Flight Bill Payments, and Balance Sheet adjustments appear. The Ledger is where you will apply tags to all of those transactions — categorizing them for business analytics, budgeting, and of course easy tax preparation.

Each row in the ledger shows a transaction and includes detailed information to assist in your bookkeeping. Those data are:

If you ever need to find a particular transaction or want to examine transactions from a particular account, the Search & Filter bar is the tool you will use.

Use the search bar to find transaction descriptions matching a text query, or to find transactions with amounts that match a numerical query.

Filters, on the other hand, are best used when you want to look at a particular group of

transactions. Ambrook enables you to filter your transactions by:

These filters can be combined to find the exact list of transactions you are looking for.

Use the 'To-Do' button at the top of the ledger to filter to 'Uncategorized' transactions to filter your ledger to only transactions that don't have a Category tag yet. This will point you to transactions you haven't gotten to yet and will keep your Analytics and Reports up-to-date!

If you want to look at a transaction in detail, click anywhere other than a tag to open the translation details pan. In addition to showing the details available in the main ledger view, the transaction detail pane is where you can create line items for a transaction and upload receipts and other attachments for recordkeeping.

Sometimes a single transaction row from a connected account needs to be broken down into multiple line items for accurate bookkeeping. Some common situations where this happens are loan payments that include both principal and interest, and transactions from general goods stores where multiple items are purchased for multiple purposes.

To break a transaction into line items, click the Add Line Items button from the transaction detail screen and enter the descriptions and amounts you want to split out.

Line items can be positive or negative, such as might be necessary to represent a refund or store credit. Once split, line items can each be tagged individually.

Use the Upload button in the transaction details pane to store your receipts right alongside the rest of the transaction data. If you’re on mobile, you also have the option to take a picture of the receipt from within the Ambrook app. You can upload as many receipts or related documents as you need to.

Bookkeeping on Ambrook primarily is done through tagging. Simply click on any of the tag icons on the right side of a transaction row and a tagging window will open where you can apply all of your available tags. Ambrook currently offers 4 tag types as part of your Chart of Accounts. These are initiated during your onboarding to Ambrook, and can be updated or expanded at any time. You can navigate among the 4 tag types using the tabs at the top of the tagging window and you can apply all of the different types of tags before clicking the Tag button to save your work.

Category tags describe the nature of a transaction. They answer the questions “What is it?” and “What happened?”. This tag type is also the one that routes each transaction to the appropriate section of your tax forms. To learn more about a particular category tag, click the information icon to the right of the category name to read a description and see which Schedule F box it is mapped to, if applicable.

Enterprise tags indicate what line of business a transaction is related to. They answer the questions “Why did we buy this?” or “Why did we earn money?”.

Entity tags indicate which business entity the transaction is associated with. Use these tags to keep the transactions of separate legal entities separate or to keep business transactions separate from personal ones.

Funding tags are flexible user-created tags that allow the tracking of transactions to a particular project or funding source. The use of funding tags allows the user to easily create comprehensive transaction lists for grant compliance reporting, or assessing project success.

If while tagging you encounter a new type of transaction and want to add a new tag to your Chart of Accounts, you can do so directly from the tagger. At the bottom of each tag list you’ll see an option to manage that list of tags. Click the Manage button to be brought to the settings page where you can add or remove tags of each kind as needed.

In the case of Category tags, Ambrook will suggest new categories to add based on your search criteria. These categories will be indicated with a (+) icon and can be added with a single click.

Oftentimes a single transaction needs to be split across multiple of the same tag type. For example, a purchase of hay may be used both by the Vegetable and Chicken enterprises, or utilities expenses are shared between legal entities by their level of usage. In those cases, you can split a transaction across tags.

After selecting a tag, a Split option will appear to the right of the tag name. Click Split and then select all tags you wish to split across and allocate the split by percentage. An even split is assumed by default unless you manually enter an uneven one.

Once you’ve got the hang of the basic bookkeeping workflow, Ambrook has a few more tools to help reduce the time you spend tagging.

Use the square checkbox on the far left side of each transaction row to initiate bulk tagging mode. In the mode, you can select as many transactions as you wish (including line items) and tag them all at once. All four kinds of tags can be applied in this manner.

One of Ambrook’s most powerful features is the ability to automate your bookkeeping. Every time you complete a tagging action and return to the Ledger, a message will appear at the bottom of your screen confirming that the transaction was tagged and giving you the option to create an automation.

Click the Automate option and a Create Automation pane will open that will be automatically populated with the Description of the transaction you just tagged as well as the tags you just applied to it. Simply click Finish & Tag Transactions to apply the same set of tags to every transaction in your ledger that matches the same Description. Automations are also applied to future transactions — the next time a transaction with this description enters your ledger from a connected account, it will have those tags applied automatically.

If you want to change the automation parameters slightly, you can do so on this screen before you click Finish & Tag Transactions. Automations are triggered based on the words or characters in the Description field, so you can edit or entirely change the Description to have the automation run on all transactions whose Descriptions match (or contain) the Description you enter here. To test your new automation before finalizing, click the Preview Tags button to see a list of all transactions in your Ledger that it would tag.

You can also automate a transaction as you're tagging it through the category tagger. To do this, click the three dots next to the 'Tag' button and select 'Create Automation'. Select the category and enterprise and hit 'Tag' to l bring you to the same workflow as above.

Consider creating an automation anytime you tag a transaction that is recurring and has a predictable description. Common examples of automatable transactions are fuel purchases, rental payments, and sales of uniformly named products.