Sales-to-accounting handoff
How a sale becomes a ledger posting, and what the posting status on a sales document means.
- Audience
- Sales users, Finance users, Administrators
- Permissions needed
- Sales document management, Journal posting
- Prerequisites
- Accounting setup and period controls
- Environment
- Production and staging
- Product version
- Current
- Last reviewed
- Owner
- Propulsive Product Team
Before you start
- A failed posting must be corrected - it is not a cosmetic status.
Sales documents (estimates, sales orders, invoices, receipts) and the accounting ledger are the same platform but two different layers: a sale is a business document, and a posting is what turns it into accounting entries.
The handoff
Each sales document carries a posting status alongside its business status:
- Not posted - the document exists but has produced no ledger entries yet. This is normal for estimates and for drafts.
- Posted - the document has generated real debit/credit entries, visible in the ledger and in reports. This is the state finance acts on.
- Failed - a posting was attempted and refused (for example, a posting rule is missing an account, or the document dates into a closed period). The document is not half-posted: nothing was written, and the failure message names the reason.
Posting is not a background nicety - it is the step that moves money-relevant records into the books, and a failed posting is work queued for someone, not a cosmetic status.
What a posting needs to succeed
The posting service maps the business event to a debit and a credit account using posting rules. If a document will not post, the rule for its event type is usually missing an account rather than the document being wrong - check the chart of accounts and the posting rules before re-attempting.
What never happens
- A sale is never silently double-posted - re-running a posting that already succeeded is refused.
- A posted entry is never edited in place. Corrections use reversing entries, so the original and its correction both stay in the audit trail.
- A document cannot post into a closed period. Period closing is the control that guarantees the books stay final; reopening is a deliberate act with its own permission.
The period dimension
Posting dates are what the fiscal calendar and period-close controls evaluate. A sales document created today that carries an invoice date in a past (open) period posts there; the same document dated into a closed period is refused. Finance users should keep the two dates aligned to avoid a pile of failed postings at period end.