Getting Started with Horizon Finance

This guide takes you from a fresh Finance workspace to a paid invoice and a closed month. It’s the same path every business follows: set up, sell, get paid, pay what you owe, reconcile, close, and read the numbers.

Note

You’ll need the Finance module active for your organization (your Horizon admin manages modules in Settings). When Finance turns on, Horizon provisions the essentials for you — a starter chart of accounts, mapped control accounts, open fiscal periods, and automatic document numbering — so you can start on step 1 below, not on configuration.

1. Look Around Your New Books

Everything in this guide lives in the Finance group in your sidebar.

1. Open Chart of Accounts (under General Ledger). You’ll find a working starter chart — assets, liabilities, income, and expenses — ready to use. Reshape it later as your business demands; you don’t need to touch it today.

2. Open Fiscal Periods. Your fiscal year is open and ready to receive transactions.

3. Open Numbering (under Setup & Configuration). Invoices, receipts, and payments number themselves in sequences you control from here.

2. Add Your First Customer

1. Go to Customers (under Accounts Receivable) and select New.

2. Enter the essentials — name, payment terms, currency. Everything else can wait.

3. Save. That’s the whole job: this customer record now follows every order, invoice, and payment you create for them.

3. Send Your First Invoice

1. Go to Invoices and create a new one for your customer: pick the items or describe the work, set quantities and prices, and watch the totals build.

2. Your invoice starts as a draft — nothing is final, edit freely.

3. Select Send when it’s ready. Your customer gets a branded PDF, and the invoice starts waiting for its money.

4. Select Post. This is the accounting moment: Horizon writes a balanced entry to your ledger — revenue on one side, the customer’s receivable on the other.

Tip

Made a mistake on a posted document? You never edit history in Horizon — reverse and void are built in. The correction posts visibly to the ledger, which is exactly what your accountant (and any auditor) wants to see.

4. Get Paid

1. When the money arrives, go to Cash Receipts and create a receipt for the amount received.

2. Apply it to your invoice — full or partial amounts both work.

3. Select Post. The invoice flips to paid, your cash account grows, and AR Aging updates on its own.

5. Pay What You Owe

The mirror image of getting paid, under Accounts Payable:

1. Add the company you’re paying in Vendors.

2. Enter their invoice as a Bill, then Post it — the expense and what you owe both land in the ledger.

3. When you pay it, record a Vendor Payment and apply it to the bill. AP Aging tracks anything still open.

6. Reconcile the Bank

1. Register the account in Bank Accounts (under Cash Management).

2. Open Bank Reconciliation and bring in your statement lines.

3. Horizon’s deterministic matcher proposes matches between statement lines and your ledger — each one shows why it matched. Confirm the good ones, match the rest by hand.

4. Teach it your recurring patterns in Match Rules (“this memo is always bank fees”) and it applies them every time after.

7. Close the Month and Read the Numbers

1. Open Period Close (under General Ledger). Work the checklist — assign tasks, attach evidence, tick items off — then close the period. Closed periods lock: nothing slips into a month you’ve already signed off.

2. Open Trial Balance (under Financial Reporting) — every account, debits equal credits, always.

3. Open Financial Statements for your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow — built live from the ledger you just posted. No exports, no spreadsheet math: these statements are your books.

Where to Go Next

You’ve now run the entire core loop. From here, explore at your own pace: expenses and mileage under Time & Expense, fixed assets with posted straight-line depreciation under Fixed Assets, the collections worklist for chasing overdue invoices, and dimensions under Setup & Configuration for department- and project-level reporting. The Finance overview maps all ten areas.