Journals that post themselves, and budgets measured against the books

A template is a journal you keep: the same accounts, usually the same figures. It is checked for balance when you save it, so it cannot turn out to be wrong on the morning somebody is closing a month with it.

A schedule posts one on its own, nightly. Whether it posts or waits as a draft is the schedule’s choice: an accrual whose figures change every month wants checking, a fixed rent does not. A schedule that has been asleep raises one entry per night rather than a year of them at once, and a failure is written down rather than leaving the schedule silently stopped.

Monthly dates are anchored on the day the schedule started, so one on the 31st lands on the 28th in February and goes back to the 31st in March, rather than walking backwards a day at a time.

Only the newest document may be deleted, and when it goes its number goes back to the counter. That is the point of the rule, since deleting anything else leaves a gap in a statutory sequence an auditor asks about.

The number went back to the counter and the deleted row went on holding it, so the next document raised failed on a constraint it could not explain: delete the newest draft quotation, write another one, and it refused. Uniqueness now applies to live documents only. Two documents that both exist still cannot share a number; one that has been deleted no longer stands in the way of the number it released.