Vouchers — payments, receipts, journals & adjustments

Where sales and purchases record goods and services, vouchers record money and adjustments. Open them from Transactions → Vouchers. Each voucher type does one clear job:

Record a voucher

1. 1

   Pick the voucher type

   For example Transactions → Vouchers → Receipt when a customer pays you.

2. 2

   Set date and number

   The voucher number follows your financial-year numbering, just like invoices — leave it blank for automatic, or type to override.

3. 3

   Enter the lines

   Each line names an account and an amount on the debit or credit side. A receipt, for instance, debits your bank and credits the customer.

4. 4

   Write a narration

   One honest sentence about why — future-you reading the ledger will be grateful.

5. 5

   Save

   Ctrl+S works here too. The voucher posts to the ledgers immediately.

Returns vs. notes — pick the right one

This is the question people get wrong most often, so keep it simple: did goods physically move? If a customer actually sent stock back, raise a Sale Return; if you actually shipped stock back to a supplier, raise a Purchase Return — both move your stock. If nothing moved and you are only adjusting money — a discount granted after the bill, a rate correction, a recovered charge — raise a Credit Note or Debit Note instead.

Finding vouchers later

Use Transactions → Vouchers → Manage to list, edit, or remove vouchers, and Reports → Vouchers for per-type registers (all payments, all receipts, and so on) with the same filters and exports as transaction registers.

Printing a cheque

You can print a cheque straight onto your bank's printed cheque leaf from a Payment or a Contra voucher. Open the voucher in Transactions → Vouchers → Manage and choose Print cheque. Receipts and journals do not print cheques — a receipt records a cheque somebody gave you, so there is nothing to print.

1. 1

   Save the voucher first

   Cheque printing is switched off while you have unsaved edits, so the cheque always matches the voucher that is actually recorded in your books.

2. 2

   Check the preview

   The dialog shows the cheque exactly as it will print — payee, date in its eight boxes, amount in figures and the amount in words. If anything is missing or too long to fit, it tells you before you use a leaf. Just above the preview it tells you which date will print and where it came from.

3. 3

   Line it up on plain paper first

   Choose Test print on paper. It prints the same layout with a measuring grid. Hold that sheet against a real cheque, then open Adjust alignment. You can move everything together half a millimetre at a time, or move the Date, Payee name, Amount in words and Amount in figures one at a time — banks space their leaves differently, so a single field is often the only thing out of place. The same panel picks your cheque size, prints chosen fields in bold, and adds an A/C Payee crossing. Your adjustments are saved for that bank account, so you only do it once — and you can publish them to your whole organisation so every colleague prints with the same alignment.

4. 4

   Print

   Print cheque is already selected when the dialog opens, so you can simply press Enter. Press Esc to close without printing.

Feeding the leaf through an ordinary A4 tray

By default the cheque is placed on an A4 sheet rather than printed on cheque-size paper, because most printers are not set up to hold a cheque-size sheet. You feed one real leaf through the tray and everything outside it simply does not print. This is how most accounting software handles cheques.

1. 1

   Choose your cheque size

   Under Adjust alignment, pick the leaf that matches your cheque book. Personal and savings books are usually the smallest size; current-account and corporate books are often larger. Each choice says how much it can be trusted — only *Custom* is your own measurement, and the rest are starting points.

2. 2

   Say how the leaf goes into the tray

   Feed it short edge first — a cheque fed the long way round is too short for most printers and will jam or be refused. Then say which end of the cheque goes in first, and which paper guide you pushed it against: left, centre or right. Getting the end the wrong way round prints the cheque upside down, which the paper test print shows you immediately.

3. 3

   Line it up once

   Run Test print on paper. It draws a box showing exactly where to place the leaf, a millimetre grid, and a cross on each field marked with its own measurement — so you can read the correction off the sheet with a ruler instead of guessing. Keep that sheet as your guide.

4. 4

   If your printer does hold cheque-size paper

   Switch Paper to *The cheque leaf itself*. It expects your printer to have a paper size matching your cheque; the panel shows you how to add one on Windows or Mac. If the size is still not offered in the print window afterwards, your printer will not take it — stay with the A4 sheet.

5. 5

   Save it as a file instead

   Save PDF stores the cheque at the exact leaf size so you can print it from any PDF reader. On a phone this happens automatically, because phones cannot open a print window themselves.

Recording the cheque number and the cheque date

Payment, Receipt and Contra vouchers each have a Cheque No. and a Cheque Date column on the entry screen. Fill them in as you enter the voucher. The same two fields can be edited later from Transactions → Vouchers → Manage, as often as you need.

1. 1

   The cheque number

   Type the number from the leaf. Use the same field for a UTR or an NEFT reference. On a Receipt, record the number of the cheque your customer gave you — that is how you find it later when you bank it.

2. 2

   The cheque date

   This is the date written on the cheque, and it is the date printed in the eight boxes. Leave it blank and the voucher date is used instead. You may enter a date in the future — that is how you issue a post-dated cheque.

Once a voucher carries a cheque number, the register shows it with a Chq tag, you can search for it, and it appears on the Bank Reconciliation and bank-statement screens to help you match it against your bank.

If Print cheque says no bank account could be identified, open that account under Masters → Accounts and either set its type to Bank or fill in its account number and IFSC. Overdraft and cash-credit accounts count as banks for this purpose. A payment made in cash never offers a cheque.