Concepts: Dimensions, Entities & Projects
The three organizing ideas behind your books — dimensions tag transactions for reporting, projects group work, and your legal entity holds the books.
Three organizing ideas run through Horizon Finance. They sound similar; they answer different questions.
Dimensions — “Which part of the business was this?”
Dimensions are tags you apply to transactions as you post them — department, class, branch, or anything you define. They are configured in your platform settings rather than inside Finance, because the rest of Horizon uses them too. They don’t change where a number lands in the chart of accounts; they add an axis to it.
Tag consistently and reporting gains that axis for free: profit and loss by department, spending by location — one set of books, sliced any way you tagged it. This is the honest answer to “do I need a separate system to see per-department numbers?” No — you need a dimension.
A practical rule: define the one or two dimensions you’ll want in every future report (department is the classic) and tag from day one. Backfilling tags is archaeology; tagging as you go is free.
Projects — “Which piece of work was this?”
Projects group activity around a piece of work — an engagement, a build, a campaign. Where dimensions describe your permanent structure, projects have a beginning and an end. Use them to gather the effort and money attached to the work itself.
Your Legal Entity — “Whose books are these?”
Every set of books belongs to a legal entity — the registered company doing the transacting. Most businesses have exactly one, and if that’s you, you’ll never think about this: your entity was set up with Finance, and everything simply belongs to it.
If your organization grows another registered company, each keeps its own clean, separate books — statements are per-entity, and an entity picker appears where it’s needed. Nothing about your first entity’s books changes.
Items — defined in Setup — sometimes get confused with these three. Items are simpler: they’re what you sell, with default prices and accounts, so invoice lines are picked instead of retyped. Dimensions say which part of the business; projects say which piece of work; items say which product or service; the entity says whose books.