Concepts: Documents & Posting
How Horizon Finance thinks — documents are the source of truth, posting writes them to the ledger, and corrections happen in the open.
Everything in Horizon Finance is a document — an invoice, a bill, a cash receipt, a journal entry. Documents move through a small, predictable lifecycle, and understanding it once means you understand every screen in Finance.
The Lifecycle
Draft → (send or submit) → post.
- Draft — the document exists but commits to nothing. Edit freely, delete freely; drafts never touch your books.
- Send — for customer-facing documents like invoices: the customer gets the branded PDF and the clock starts. Still nothing in the ledger.
- Submit for approval — when an approval chain covers the document, it routes for sign-off before it can move on.
- Post — the accounting moment. Horizon writes a balanced ledger entry — debits equal credits, always, enforced by the database itself — and the document becomes part of your books.
- Apply — for documents that settle another document: a cash receipt against an invoice, a credit memo against an invoice, a bill credit against a bill. Apply is a separate step that happens after posting, and it is the step that moves the target to partial or paid. Post books the cash; apply is what says which invoice it was for.
A document’s status is visible right on its list, so you can always tell a draft from a posted record at a glance.
A posted receipt or credit that has never been applied has hit your ledger but settled nothing specific. If an invoice is still showing as open after you recorded the payment, an unapplied receipt is the first thing to check.
Posted Means Permanent — Corrections Happen in the Open
Once posted, a document is never silently edited. When something’s wrong:
- Reverse posts the mirror entry and, where it applies, lets a corrected version take its place. The original, the reversal, and the correction all remain visible.
- Void cancels a document that shouldn’t stand, visibly.
This is the property your accountant cares about most: the ledger’s history only ever grows. Anyone auditing your books can follow every number to a document, and every correction to its reason.
One Ledger Under Everything
Subledgers — receivables, payables, assets — are views into the same single ledger, tied to it through mapped control accounts. That’s why totals agree across screens: the trial balance and the P&L aren’t separate systems reconciled against each other, they’re two readings of one set of books, computed from the ledger when you ask for them.
AR and AP aging are the exception, and it’s worth knowing. Aging is a stored snapshot refreshed on a schedule and on demand, not a live read — so an invoice posted since the last refresh may not be in it yet. The aging screens tell you when what you’re looking at is stale.
Every transition — submitted, approved, posted, reversed, voided — writes an audit row with its timestamp, the before and after, and the reason where one is required. The person is identified through their finance employee record, so make sure the people working in your books have one. Approval actions go further: one cannot be recorded without an identified actor at all.
The audit trail isn’t a feature you turn on; it’s how the system works.