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 and serves as your home base while bookkeeping. 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 transaction 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. Below is an example of Line Items you might create as part of a loan payment - see this article for more details on handling loan payments.

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.