Accrual and cash
You made a sale today and you'll get paid in thirty days. Is that money yours today or a month from now?
Both answers are correct, and that is exactly why accrual accounting exists. You earned it today —the work is done, the invoice issued, the right to collect is real— but your cash didn't move. If you record the sale today, your cash flow lies. If you wait thirty days, your result for the month lies. Any system that forces you to pick a single date is going to lie to you half the time.
Clatri doesn't make you choose. Every movement has two dates.
The two dates
On the form for any expense or income you'll see two fields, and each one tells you plainly which report it feeds:
- When the income was earned / when the expense was incurred → "Used in Results". This is the economic date: when the thing happened.
- When the money was received / when it was paid → "Used in Cash flow". This is the money date: when the money moved.
They almost always match. You bought a coffee and paid for it: one date, twice. But when they don't match, Clatri records it as what it is, and one single transaction yields two honest reports.
On each transaction's Accounting screen you'll see them by name: Accrued on and Paid on (or Collected on).
What already counts but hasn't moved
When you record an expense or an income there's a switch: Not paid yet / Not received yet. The help text says it in a handful of words: "It counts now; the money moves later."
That turns the transaction into a receivable or a payable. And something important happens: the amount already affects your Income statement, but doesn't touch the balance of any bank account, because there's no money to move. A pending item never inflates a balance. It's the difference between having earned money and having it.
All of that comes together on one screen: To collect and pay, whose subtitle is the full definition of the concept — "It already counts; the money hasn't moved yet".
To collect and pay
Two sections, To collect and To pay, and inside each one your pending items sorted by age: 0 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, over 60 days. That aging isn't decorative. A client who's gone sixty days without paying you isn't the same problem as one who's gone five, and seeing them separately is what tells you who to call today.
Three things land here: the credit transactions you recorded, your obligations and the balance of your credit cards.
When you finally get paid, you tap Mark as collected (or Mark as paid) and Clatri tells you exactly what it's going to do: "It will count as money moved today and the account balance will update."
The three facts you should never confuse
Underneath all this there's a distinction worth being clear about, because it's the one that prevents the expensive mistakes:
| Fact | What it is | What it touches |
|---|---|---|
| Accrual | Something was earned or consumed | Your Income statement |
| Collection or payment | A receivable or payable is settled | Your Balance sheet |
| Bank movement | Money came into or left the bank | Your Cash flow |
One event can touch all three at once, or just one. Selling for cash touches all of them. Issuing an invoice on credit touches only the first. Collecting that invoice touches the second and third, but not the first — because you already touched it when you made the sale. Counting it again would count the sale twice.
That's where the rule that governs everything else comes from.
Reconciling never creates a second fact
If the money is already in your bank, the cash fact already exists.
It came through your bank connection, through a statement you uploaded or because you recorded it by hand. It doesn't matter: it's already there. Connecting it to the invoice it pays doesn't create another income. Creating one would duplicate the money, and your reports would start showing a prosperity that doesn't exist.
That's why Reconcile payment exists: "Connect an existing account movement to one or more receivables or payables. This will not create another transaction."
The flow has two modes:
- Use existing — the money already moved. You pick the bank movement and allocate it. A single deposit can settle several invoices (a deposit of 250 covers 150 of one and 100 of another), and one invoice can receive several partial payments.
- New payment — no movement exists yet. Clatri records the money and reduces the balance in a single operation.
When you finish, the message is explicit: "Payment reconciled without duplicating the transaction."
When what moved isn't what was settled
You were owed 1,000 and 970 arrived. The difference can't be ignored or invented: you have to say what it was. Clatri makes you classify it as one of four things:
- Fee — what the payment gateway or the bank kept
- Withholding — a tax withheld at the source
- Discount — you forgave it
- Write-off — you gave it up as lost
Each one goes to a different place in your books, and none of the four is "30 left over". This is the kind of detail that separates an expense app from an accounting system.
Every reconciliation is kept in a payment history and can be reversed: "The bank movement will remain, but the receivable or payable balance will reopen." The money is never deleted; the link is undone.
Seeing the world through one lens or the other
On the Money dashboard, the balance card has two modes that change the lens on everything you see:
- Earned and spent — the accrual lens. What happened in the period, whether it was paid or not.
- In and out — the cash lens. What moved, regardless of when it happened.
They're the same truth seen from two angles. A month can be excellent in results and distressing in cash: you sold a lot on credit. That isn't a contradiction in the system, it's information you need, and it's the reason so many profitable businesses go under.
Reports follow that same logic and don't let you mix them: the Income statement is accrual by definition, the Cash flow is cash by definition. There's no switch to change them, on purpose. They're different questions and each one already has its answer.
An expense that doesn't touch any account
When you record a movement you can choose No source: "Counts in your reports without touching any account."
It's for things that happened economically but didn't come out of any of your pockets: something a third party paid for you, a consumption you had already prepaid, an adjustment. The result changes; the cash doesn't. It's the same idea as always —two different facts— taken all the way.