Cargolake
Help & Guides/Finance

Financial reports and the event log

Trial balance, income statement, balance sheet, bank reconciliation — and how to find a posting that never arrived.

The reports

Finance → Reports produces five:

ReportWhat it shows
Summary trial balanceEvery account with its debit and credit totals. The first check that the ledger balances.
Trial balance by GL accountThe same for a single account, drilled into its lines.
Income statementRevenue and expenses for a period.
Balance sheetAssets, liabilities and equity at a point in time.
Bank reconciliationLedger against bank statement.

Reading them in order

When something looks wrong, work top down:

  1. Summary trial balance — does the ledger balance at all, and does anything sit on the wrong side of its normal balance?
  2. Trial balance by account — for the account that looks odd, what are the actual lines?
  3. The journal line — which posting rule produced it? See Posting rules.

An account showing a balance opposite to its normal side is the single most useful signal on the trial balance. It usually means either a posting rule with the Dr/Cr reversed, or an account typed wrongly — see The chart of accounts.

The bank reconciliation report

This one is a control rather than a statement: it compares the ledger to the bank and shows what does not agree. Run it every period. Two patterns to watch:

  • Statement lines with no ledger entry — a transaction you never recorded.
  • Ledger entries with no statement line — something you recorded that the bank never saw. Old ones are usually a duplicate or a payment that failed.

See Bank, treasury and cheques.

Before reporting a period

  • All invoices for the period are issued.
  • All vendor invoices are entered — see Vendor invoices.
  • Charge lines awaiting cost are cleared or accrued — see Quotation charge lines and closed periods.
  • Bank accounts are reconciled.
  • The period is closed, so the numbers cannot subsequently move.

The event log

Finance → Event log shows the events the finance system has received from the rest of the platform — an invoice issued, a cheque updated, a custody payment processed — and what happened to each.

FieldNotes
KeyComposite of source and identifier.
SourceWhich part of the system raised it.
StatusSee below.
Attempt countHow many times processing was tried.
ErrorsEach attempt's error, with the time it occurred.
MetadataContext about the event.
ResultThe outcome.

Status

StatusMeaning
ProcessingIn flight.
ProcessedDone.
FailedProcessing failed.
Manual interventionParked, awaiting a person.

Failed and manual intervention can both be retried from this screen. Processing and processed cannot — one is still running and the other is already done.

This is where a missing journal is explained

If an invoice was issued and no journal appeared, the event log is the first place to look, and it usually answers the question outright:

  • No event at all — the originating action did not raise one. The problem is upstream, not in finance.
  • Failed — the error list says why. Fix the cause, then retry.
  • Manual intervention — the system deliberately stopped, because processing needed a decision it could not make.
  • Processed, but no journal — the event was handled and no posting rule matched it. Go to Posting rules and work down the checklist there.

Retrying safely

Retry after fixing the cause, not before. A retry re-runs the same processing against the same event; if the underlying configuration is still wrong, it fails again and adds another attempt to the list.

Do not let failures accumulate. A backlog in the event log means the ledger is incomplete, and every report drawn from it is understated by an amount nobody has quantified.

Last updated 13 September 2026