Every transactional document — order, receipt, invoice, payment, adjustment — lives the same three-stage life.
- Draft. The document exists and can be edited freely, but it has changed nothing: no entries in the books, no movement of stock. A draft is a proposal. (Orders are a partial exception in one respect: once approved, an order counts as a commitment — it is included when the application measures a customer's credit exposure and a supplier's open commitments.)
- Approved. A person with the approve permission for that kind of document has checked it and marked it approved. Approval is a decision, recorded with a name and a time. An approved document can no longer be edited.
- Posted. The document's entries are written into the general ledger and, where stock is involved, stock moves. Posting is the point of no return — a posted document is a fact of the company's history (see 1.6).
Approve and post are separate permissions, deliberately: many companies let a manager approve a payment that only the accountant may post. Whether the two stages happen in one click or two is your company's auto-post choice (see 1.8).
Figure 1.3 — The life of a document. Drawing to be produced after the UI/UX pass: the three stages — draft, approved, posted — with who acts at each stage, the reversal that undoes a posting, and the void available before posting.
Details that apply everywhere:
- Numbers. Each document receives its number from your company's numbering sequences (SO-…, GR-…, SI-…) when it is created, so paperwork can be quoted and searched from its first minute as a draft.
- Dates follow your company's day. A new document is dated with your company's today — the calendar day where your company is, from its timezone — not the server's day. Working late in the evening, an invoice you raise carries your local date and posts into the period that contains it, even when it is already tomorrow somewhere else in the world. The same local day is the "today" your dashboards, alerts and Ask questions mean, so every screen agrees about which day it is. A date you type yourself is never changed — the local day only fills in a date you have not chosen.
- Quantities always carry their unit. Stock is measured in named units — kg, tonnes, bags, pieces — and every quantity on every screen and print says which. The application never assumes a unit silently.
- The next step is linked. A view page offers the document's natural next stage as an action — raise the waybill from the order, the invoice from the waybill, the receipt from the invoice — carrying across everything already known, including prices and exchange rates. Each link appears only if you hold the permission to create that next document.
- [Simple] In Simple workflow depth, the middle stages do not exist at all: there is no order to approve before the invoice, so the invoice itself carries the draft → approve → post life (see 0.5).