Money
Bookkeeping
The school's own books: money in and out, fees that post themselves, documents scanned from a phone, and the trial balance, income statement and balance sheet.
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Bookkeeping is the school’s own set of books: every rand that comes in and goes out, sorted into accounts, with the reports an accountant or auditor asks for drawn straight from them.
It is separate from school fees. Fees is about what guardians are billed. Bookkeeping is about everything — salaries, electricity, donations, the bank balance.
Setting it up
The first time anyone with Manage Bookkeeping opens Finance → Bookkeeping, Alviyora asks two things.
Recording money in and money out
This is what you will do most. On Overview or Journal, choose Money in or Money out and fill in:
| Date | When the money actually moved |
| Amount | In rands and cents |
| Category | What it was for — Donations, Electricity and water |
| Paid into / Paid from | The bank or cash account it moved through |
| Description | A line somebody else will understand next year |
| Received from / Paid to | Who the other party was |
| Document number | The number on the invoice, receipt or deposit slip |
You never choose a debit or a credit on this form. Alviyora works both out from whether it was money in or money out, so they cannot be put the wrong way round.
Attaching the document
Every entry should have its proof behind it — the invoice, the receipt, the deposit slip. Open an entry in the Journal with the arrow at the start of its row, and under Documents you have two ways to add one.
Upload file takes a photo or PDF from your computer.
Scan with phone is for the piece of paper in your hand:
Documents are stored privately. The link you click to view one works for a few minutes and is made fresh each time, so a document cannot be passed around by copying its address.
A document attached by mistake can be removed with the bin beside it. That removes the document only; the entry is unchanged.
School fees post themselves
If you collect school fees through Alviyora, you do not record fee income here. Each fee invoice and each fee payment is added to the books automatically, the moment it happens:
| When | What is recorded |
|---|---|
| A fee invoice is issued | School fees receivable goes up; School fees income goes up |
| A fee payment arrives — online, EFT or cash | The bank goes up; School fees receivable goes down |
| A payment is reversed, or an invoice is voided | The original entry is reversed |
These show in the Journal as Fee invoice and Fee payment, with the learner’s name and the invoice number. School fees receivable is therefore always the total that families still owe.
On the Overview, under School fees in the books, you choose the bank account fee payments are paid into.
What you pay Alviyora posts itself too
Your school’s own Alviyora subscription is recorded the same way, so that is not captured by hand either:
| When | What is recorded |
|---|---|
| Alviyora invoices your school | Software and subscriptions — an expense — goes up; Accounts payable goes up |
| Your school pays the invoice | Accounts payable goes down; the bank goes down |
| A payment is reversed, or an invoice is voided | The original entry is reversed |
These show in the Journal as Alviyora invoice and Payment to Alviyora. The subscription appears on your income statement in the month it was invoiced, and Accounts payable includes whatever your school still owes Alviyora.
Payments come out of the same bank account you chose for fee payments. As with fees, do not also record your Alviyora subscription under Money out — it would be counted twice.
When a fee cannot be added
Occasionally a fee transaction cannot go into the books straight away — its month has been closed, or its financial year has not been added yet. Nothing is lost. It waits, and the Overview shows it under Fee transactions waiting to be added, with the reason. Reopen the month or add the year and it goes in by itself; Try again does the same on demand.
Checking the books against invoicing
On the Overview, Invoicing compared with the books sets what the invoicing system says was invoiced, paid and reversed beside what the books hold, line by line — once for school fees, and once for your Alviyora subscription. In step means they agree and nothing is waiting to be added.
Alviyora checks this every night and adds anything that was missed. Check now does the same on demand.
If the comparison mentions adjustments or write-offs, those are not added automatically — record them with a journal entry.
Doing it by hand instead
Untick Add fee invoices and payments automatically if you would rather record fee income yourself. Nothing is added while it is off, and what happened in the meantime is not added later when you switch it back on.
Journal entries
For what money in and money out cannot express — opening balances, moving money between two bank accounts, depreciation, a correction your accountant has asked for — use Journal → Journal entry.
Add a line for each account, with the amount under Debit or Credit. The form shows the two totals and how far out of balance they are, and Post entry stays unavailable until they are equal.
Bringing in opening balances
If the school already has money in the bank, start with one journal entry dated the first day of your first financial year, with Opening balances ticked:
- Debit each bank account, and anything else the school owns, with its balance.
- Credit anything the school owes.
- Put the difference against Opening balance equity so the entry balances.
Entries are never edited or deleted
A wrong entry is reversed: the arrow at the end of its row in the Journal posts a second entry that cancels it exactly. Both stay on the record, each pointing at the other. Then record the correct entry.
This is deliberate. It is how a paper journal works, and it is what lets an auditor trust that the books they are reading are the books as they happened.
Accounts
Accounts lists the chart of accounts in five groups:
| Group | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Assets | What the school owns or is owed — bank balances, equipment, unpaid fees |
| Liabilities | What the school owes — unpaid bills, loans, fees paid in advance |
| Equity | What is left for the school once what it owes is taken from what it owns |
| Income | What the school earns — fees, donations, fundraising |
| Expenses | What it costs to run the school — salaries, utilities, supplies |
Click an account’s name for its ledger: every entry that touched it over a period, with the balance after each one. For a bank account, this is the page to hold next to the bank statement.
Tick Bank or cash account on an asset account to have it offered under Paid into and Paid from.
An account that has been used can be renamed, but its code and type are locked — changing them would move its history from one report to another. An account you no longer need is switched off rather than deleted, so its history stays.
Reports
Reports draws three statements, for a month, a quarter or the whole financial year:
| Report | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Trial balance | Every account’s closing balance, debits on one side and credits on the other. The two totals are always equal. |
| Income statement | What the school earned and spent over the period, and the surplus or deficit that leaves. |
| Balance sheet | What the school owns and owes on the last day of the period. |
Choose the financial year, then Whole year, a quarter or a month — so a monthly, quarterly or yearly trial balance is the same report with a different period picked.
Export to Excel downloads exactly what is on screen, with the amounts as numbers your accountant can add up.
Annual financial statements
A fourth report, Annual financial statements, draws a whole financial year as one set, with the year before beside it:
| Statement | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Statement of financial position | What the school owns and owes on the last day of the year. |
| Statement of financial performance | What it earned and spent over the year, and the surplus or deficit that leaves. |
| Statement of changes in funds | How the school’s accumulated funds moved from the start of the year to the end. |
| Cash flow statement | Where the year’s cash came from and went, from the surplus to the change in the bank. |
Export to Excel downloads all four as one workbook, a sheet each, with the year’s trial balance as a fifth.
Every annual set opens with a Not audited notice, and each sheet of the export carries the same line, so it stays with the figures wherever the file is sent.
Under the statements is a note on school fees: what was invoiced in the year, and what families owed at its start and at its end.
The page says plainly when the figures are not final:
- Interim figures — the financial year has not ended yet.
- Some months are still open — the year has ended, but months in it have not been closed and can still change.
- Fee transactions are missing from these figures — some of the year’s fee invoices or payments are still waiting to be added to the books, and the statements leave them out until they are.
Budget
Budget sets what the school plans to receive and spend in each income and expense account for a financial year, and shows how the year is going against it.
Each account then shows its Budget, the Actual amount recorded so far this year, the Difference between them, and how much of the budget is Used. An expense that has gone past its budget is marked Over budget. The totals at the top compare income, spending and the surplus with what was planned.
Export to Excel downloads the same table.
Setting a budget needs Manage Bookkeeping. Anyone with View Bookkeeping can read it.
Financial years and closing a month
Financial years lists each year and its twelve months.
Close a month once it has been checked and reported on. Nothing more can be recorded with a date in a closed month, so the figures in the report you handed over stay the figures in the books. If something was genuinely missed, Reopen the month, record it, and close it again.
Near the end of a year, choose Add next financial year. Until you do, nothing can be recorded with a date in the new year.
There is no year-end closing step. Income and expenses restart from zero at the start of each financial year on their own, and the surplus of earlier years shows on the balance sheet as Accumulated surplus from prior years.
What bookkeeping does not do
Bookkeeping is for recording a school’s day-to-day money clearly. It is not full accounting software, and these are deliberately left out:
- Supplier bills and due dates. Record a payment as Money out on the day it is paid, with the supplier’s invoice attached.
- Matching against your bank. There is no bank feed and no bank-statement matching. Check your bank statement against the account’s ledger under Accounts.
- Automatic discounts. A learner’s discount is set by hand on their fee account — see school fees.
- Official annual financial statements. The annual set is drawn from your books for your accountant or auditor, who prepares the official statements.
- Invoices for anything other than school fees. Record other income as Money in, with its document attached.