Income & expenses

Income and expense transactions are the day-to-day records of money moving in and out of your business. Each one posts a balanced journal entry behind the scenes, so the books stay double-entry without you touching the ledger — see Journals.

Recording an expense

Go to Expenses → New. Date, amount, and description are required; the rest is optional but worth filling in:

• Category — where the expense lands in your reports.
• Vendor — free text, or a link to a supplier record. Past vendor names are suggested so one vendor does not end up spelled three ways, and picking a known vendor prefills the category from their most recent expense.
• Account — which bank or cash account the money left. See Bank accounts & imports.
• Currency and exchange rate — for foreign-currency expenses the converted amount is shown as you type; see Multi-currency.
• Payment method, reference, tax deductible and tax amount.

Save & add another keeps the date, currency, category and payment method so you can capture a stack of receipts quickly.

Income works the same way under Income → New, with a client instead of a vendor. Money you are owed is better raised as an invoice; the income form is for money received outside one.

Categories

Categories live under Settings → Categories. Every new organisation starts with a sensible default set — income categories like Sales, Services and Consulting, and expense categories like Office Supplies, Travel, Software & Subscriptions and Rent — and you can add, edit, recolour or delete your own.

Beyond income and expense, categories can also be asset, liability or equity types. These balance-sheet categories (Owner's Equity, Director's Loan, Computer Equipment, and so on) are what transfers and other non-trading movements post to.

Attachments and receipts

Attach the receipt when you capture an expense — it is your tax evidence, and PulseBooks warns loudly (with a retry) if the file fails to upload after the expense saves. You can also add or remove image and PDF attachments later from the transaction's edit page.

Receipt OCR

On paid plans the Receipt Scanner panel on the new expense page (and its Document Scanner twin on the income page) reads a photographed or uploaded receipt for you. Drop a JPEG, PNG or PDF up to 10MB, or use your phone's camera, and the AI extracts the vendor, date, total, currency, tax amount, reference, description and payment method. Apply to Expense fills the form in.

Two things to know:

• The uploaded file is sent to an AI provider for extraction. Extraction is not perfect, so the form flags applied data with "review and save" — always check the fields before saving.
• A vendor name read off a receipt is applied as text, never silently linked to a supplier record. Turning it into a real supplier link is one click in the vendor picker if that is what you want.

Receipt OCR requires a Pro or Business plan; plain file attachment works on every plan. See Plans & billing.

Editing, and what gets locked

Most fields on a transaction stay editable forever. Two situations lock parts of it:

• Payment-linked — a transaction that records an invoice payment mirrors that payment, so its type, amount, date, currency, invoice and client cannot change, and it cannot be deleted directly. Manage it from the invoice's payment history instead: reversing the payment there removes the transaction with it. Transactions written by bill payments likewise belong to the bill — reverse the payment from the bill to remove them.
• Reconciled — a transaction matched to a bank statement line keeps its type, amount, date, currency and account fixed, because those are exactly what the match vouched for. Category, description, vendor, reference and tax details all stay editable — categorising imported rows after they are reconciled is the normal workflow. See Reconciliation.

Deleting a transaction reverses its journal entry rather than erasing it, and a delete inside a closed period is refused — see Period close.

Categorisation rules

Under Settings → Rules you can write standing rules that automatically categorise imported bank statement lines. A rule matches on the line's description, reference or vendor — contains, starts with, or equals, case-insensitive — optionally narrowed by direction (money in or out), an amount range, or a specific account. When it fires it sets the category, and can also set the vendor and the tax-deductible flag.

Rules are evaluated top to bottom and the first match wins; you can reorder, toggle and edit them at any time. Two boundaries keep them predictable:

• Rules apply to newly imported lines only — existing transactions are never changed.
• A rule that names a counterpart account describes a transfer between your own accounts. It raises a suggestion on the reconcile screen; it never records the transfer for you.

The reconcile screen also offers Create rule from this… on any line, prefilled from the line you are looking at. Writing rules requires a Pro or Business plan, the same as bank imports.