The workspace keeps Home and the Daily work, Sales, Purchases, Inventory, Banking, Reports and Setup groups in one sidebar. Search and jump to any screen with Ctrl K, while the active company and book stay visible. This page walks through each group with real screens from a fictional sample business.
Illustrative screenshots show Willow Corner Shop in version 1.0.0. Current capabilities are described in the text; the release media kit identifies its verified screenshots.
See what needs attention before opening a register. Quick actions create the day's common documents, while cash, receivables, payables and recent activity stay together on one screen.
Home shows drafts waiting for review, the cash and bank position, overdue receivables and payables, and the most recent posted activity. Quick actions start an expense, a receipt, an invoice, a bill or a journal from the same place, so the morning starts with a decision rather than a search through menus.
Record everyday money movements directly, or use a general journal when an entry needs several accounts. Every path ends in the same balanced posting service.
Record money in or money out against one category. Drafts stay outside the books until you post them, and the register keeps Draft, Posted and Reversed transactions apart, so a half-finished entry never distorts a report while it waits for the receipt to turn up.
Enter the date, amount, counterparty, cash or bank account and category. The posting preview shows the exact journal lines before the transaction changes the books, which is how a bookkeeper checks that an electricity bill lands in the right expense account rather than discovering it at month end.
Filter drafts, posted journals and reversals in one register. Each row shows equal debits and credits, and the detail panel preserves the reference, the date, the lines and the history of the entry, so an auditor can read a journal without opening the database.
Build a journal with up to 100 lines and inspect the balance before posting. Posted entries are never edited: a correction records its reason and links the reversal to the original entry, so the trail from the wrong figure to the right one stays readable in every account statement.
Create invoices and customer credits, then follow what has been paid and what remains open, all from one register.
Choose the customer, the dates, the currency and whether entered prices include or exclude tax. Add a product, an account, a quantity, a unit price and a tax code on each line; totals are recomputed when you preview or save, so the figure on screen is always the figure that will post.
The register separates Draft, Unpaid, Overdue, Paid and Reversed documents. Open an invoice to see its due date, reference, entered-price mode and remaining balance, then record a receipt without leaving the list. Customer credits appear in the same place, so an allocation is one click rather than a hunt.
Follow a supplier commitment from order and receipt to bill and payment, with the received-but-unbilled position always visible.
Filter bills by status and date, review the ageing, and open the selected supplier document beside the register. Supplier payments can be allocated across several open items in one go, and the remaining amount on each bill stays visible until it reaches zero.
Record ordered quantities, receive goods and record returns against the order. The workflow keeps received quantities visible and supports the reconciliation of goods received but not yet billed, which is where stock and accounts payable usually drift apart in a spreadsheet.
Keep the legal name, country, contacts and activity in one shared record. Receivable and payable balances remain separate even when the same party has both roles, so the wholesaler who also buys from you never has the two sides netted off by accident.
Keep saleable stock and non-stock products in one register without turning stock into a separate set of books.
Stock counts preview their accounting effect before posting. Weighted-average cost flows into cost of sales on the profit and loss, and non-stock products remain available for document lines without a quantity balance, so a service line and a stock line can share one invoice.
Reconcile imported statement lines against the transactions already in the books, and keep each completed statement with its account.
Preview a CSV statement import before anything posts. Matching suggestions require explicit confirmation, unexplained lines stay visible until someone deals with them, and the completed statement history remains with the bank account so next month starts from a reconciled opening balance.
Move from a financial total to the journals and source documents behind it. Choose a calendar preset or a custom period, then export the result to CSV.
Choose a report and a calendar preset or a custom period. Reports use posted journals only and export their result to CSV, and the reports screen itself summarises cash and bank, income year to date, costs and expenses and net profit before you open anything.
The balance sheet groups account balances and keeps the accounting equation visible at the date you choose. Every account name opens the underlying statement, so the total for cash and bank can be followed to the bank accounts and from there to the journals that moved them.
Compare debit and credit balances for the selected period, account by account, and drill down from any account to the entries behind the figure. The trial balance proves the arithmetic; the drill-down is how you check that the arithmetic describes what happened.
Ageing separates current and overdue open items into time bands, for customers and for suppliers. Move from a band total to the customer, supplier or source document that makes it up, which is the list a small business actually needs on a Friday afternoon.
The account statement lists each posted movement in date order with its journal reference, so the opening balance, the debits, the credits and the closing balance reconcile on one page and each line can be opened to the document that caused it.
Enter expected weekly receipts and payments to inspect a possible cash path over the coming weeks. The cash scenario uses your assumptions, not a prediction, and it does not change the books; it exists so that an owner can see whether next month's rent is covered before it is due.
Set the accounting structure before daily work begins, then control dates, modules and reporting access as the company changes.
Use a country package or build the account structure you need. Accounts carry their type and reporting position into journals and financial reports, so a new account appears in the right place on the balance sheet the moment it is created.
Define tax codes and dated rates, then choose whether document prices include or exclude tax. Historical documents keep the rate that applied when they were posted, and no national tax rules are inferred: regional certification and e-invoicing are later releases, stated as such.
Enter opening account balances and convert unpaid customer and supplier documents separately, then preview the result before the cutover posts. A business that starts from zero simply records that no cutover is needed, and the screen says so.
Set the dates available for posting and close a period when its work is complete. Later drafts cannot post into a closed date range, and a closed period can be reopened deliberately by someone with the right to do so, with the change recorded.
Inventory, Purchasing and the illustrative cash point of sale are modules. A company can show only the work its people need, hide receivables and payables navigation it does not use, and record a reason for each change so the setup history explains itself later.
Report-only OAuth connections and personal tokens expose approved reporting access to an accountant's tool or a dashboard, with tokens that expire after 30 days. API writes are not part of PHP Ledger 1.0, which keeps every posting inside the reviewed paths above.
Install from the browser, then keep each release and its matched recovery path together. No terminal, Composer, Node or Docker is needed for setup.
Unzip the package, upload the phpledger folder anywhere inside your website and open its address. The installer starts by itself and checks PHP 8.2+, MySQL 8.0.19+ (8.4 recommended) or MariaDB 10.4+ and the required extensions and settings. Then connect the database, choose a username for the first account and set up the first company from the browser.
Apply a signed release from the maintenance page. An automatic matched backup of the files and the database is taken before anything changes, and the signature is verified before the package is unpacked.
Automatic recovery restores the matched state if a migration fails or the host cuts the request short. A CLI recovery companion is available for hosts that need it.
The first stable release covers the core accounting workflows below. The limits are published rather than implied, and none of them were added; maintenance has stopped for lack of funds.
Four questions that come up in the first demo, answered the way the software behaves.
Yes. Inventory, Purchasing and the cash point of sale are modules that a company switches on or off under Setup, and accounts receivable and payable navigation can be hidden. Switching a module off does not delete its history.
No. A draft never touches the books. Reports use posted journals only, so a receipt or expense affects the profit and loss only after someone reviews and posts it.
Posted entries are never edited. A correction records its reason and posts a linked reversal, so the original entry, the reversal and the replacement stay connected in the history and in the account statements.
Ten base currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, PKR, INR, MYR, BDT, LKR, NPR and SGD, one per company. Multi-currency posting inside one company is not part of 1.0.
Try the real installer and shared application. All demo records and sessions reset hourly.
Try the live demoPHP 8.2+, MySQL 8.0.19+ (8.4 recommended) or MariaDB 10.4+ and a browser installer.
Download 1.4.7Ask questions, discuss support, or request a commercial licence.
Pricing and licenceThese workflows use the same reviewed drafts, exact amounts, source references and immutable posting controls as the rest of the books.
Record aggregate payroll accruals, staff advances, deductions and partial settlements. Keep per-person information in the confidential employee register. This is accounting for reviewed totals, not a pay-run engine, payslips or statutory payroll calculation.
Prepare recurring, accrual and loan journal drafts. Review dates, principal, interest and disclosed rate/day conventions before posting. A schedule does not certify agreement with a lender contract.
Use the close checklist, cash counts, dated reversals and fiscal-year preview. Select a legal treatment and destination accounts explicitly; partnership allocations require reviewed ratios. Reopen through traceable controls.
The confidential employee register connects to existing sales-staff and driver identities through explicit mappings, preserving historical names. Employment does not imply a related-party designation. Basic trade matching uses only collected fields; bank matching is not provided.
Install optional data-only CC0 sample packages from the reviewed directory or upload a validated archive. Choose a zero-balance structure or a separate fictional practice company. The core keeps its neutral starter. Plugins retain a separate reviewed lifecycle and encrypted private secret storage.
Install in a browser on PHP 8.2+ with MySQL 8.0.19+ (8.4 recommended) or MariaDB 10.4+. Configure a validated table prefix and database TLS where needed. The official container channels are GHCR and Docker Hub. Arabic has RTL support as a draft translation awaiting native review.
Try the shared installer demo, follow the installation guide, or help test and improve a workflow.
