Businesses

Almost nobody starts a business by incorporating a company. They start by selling. And for months —sometimes years— that business lives inside someone's personal life: it gets paid into their usual account, pays with their usual card, and its accounting is a hunch.

Clatri is built for that business too, not only for the one that's already formally registered. But to do it right, you have to answer one question before any other.

The question that decides everything: its own tax ID?

It's the onboarding question, and it isn't red tape: it's the only one that matters.

Your business has a tax ID different from yours. It's a legal entity: a real company, with its own bank accounts, its own obligations and its own books. In Clatri that's a separate business entity, with its own Balance sheet. You create it in Settings → Entities. On purpose, no agent can create an entity: that decision is yours and yours alone.

Your business uses your same tax ID. You're a side venture, a freelancer, an individual with commercial activity. Legally, your bank accounts are the same. Duplicating them in Clatri would be lying. So the business is not a separate entity: it's a business inside your personal entity. You can have several.

It's not a technicality. It's the difference between a system that reflects your legal reality and one that forces you to invent one.

Business, project or entity

If it's…	Use
A one-off activity that ends (a trip, an event, a client)	Project
A business or line that's ongoing inside the current entity, with no accounts of its own	Business
A new formal company, with its own tax ID, accounts and books	A business-type Entity

Business lines

A business entity can also have businesses inside it. It's the same mechanism, read differently: business lines, segments under the same tax ID. A company that runs a restaurant and a catering service isn't two companies: it's one, with two lines worth measuring separately.

A single rule governs them, and it's the one that keeps everything honest:

A business is an analytical dimension, not a separate set of books.

That is: it has no bank accounts of its own and no balances of its own. The accounts belong to the entity. A business's result —its sales minus its expenses— is derived from the movements you tag to it. If you delete the business, its transactions aren't deleted or reclassified: they keep their historical tag.

And since a bank account belongs to the entity, to separate the money you don't split the account: you split the movements.

Splitting what's shared

The rent both your businesses use. The software that serves both. The salary of someone who works for both.

On the transaction's Accounting screen, the Business lines section does the splitting: "Split this transaction across your business lines. The entity total never changes."

That last sentence is the guarantee. You split by percentage and the consolidated total doesn't move by a single cent — it only says how much each segment carries. Later, when you open the Income statement for one of them, the shared lines show you where they come from: "{percentage}% of {amount} from the whole entity". You'll never confuse the part with the whole.

And if something was left unsplit, the report warns you: "{amount} is not assigned to any business line."

Watch out for one temptation: the fact that an income comes into the bank account you use for the business doesn't mean it belongs to that business. Clatri doesn't assume it. The assignment is always explicit.

The workspace

Each business has its own screen, with three numbers at the top —Sales, Net and To collect— and four doors:

• Products and services — your catalog
• Transactions — this business's movements
• Quotes — your offers and invoices
• Reports — the three financial statements, filtered to this business

The catalog

What you sell: products or services.

Each item carries its price and, if you want to know whether you're making money, its cost: a cost per unit, or a percentage of the price. With that, Clatri shows you the margin without you having to calculate it.

An item can have more than one price: the base price and any you name —wholesale, distributor, volume, with a suggested minimum quantity—. When you sell or quote, if the item has several, Clatri asks which one to use; the line keeps the chosen price and doesn't change even if you later edit the list.

Inventory is optional, and this matters. A service never carries inventory. A product may or may not: if you sell shirts and want to know how many are left, you turn it on; if you sell something that doesn't run out, you don't. An item without inventory is sold and invoiced just the same.

When you do turn it on, the sale does two things on its own: it deducts the units and records the cost of sales against inventory. That's why you shouldn't also record an inventory adjustment for that sale — it would deduct twice. Adjustments exist only for physical corrections: it got damaged, it got lost, you miscounted.

The catalog's product category is a commercial shelf. It organizes your list. It decides nothing in accounting: that's the job of the Chart of accounts.

Selling

Recording a sale is a four-step wizard —Customer → Items → Payment → Review— and the decision that really matters is in the third:

• Paid now — a cash sale. Clatri asks which account the money came into.
• Collect later — a sale on credit. The income already counts in your Income statement, and it stays as an account receivable in To collect and pay until you get paid.

The customer is optional: a walk-in sale doesn't need a name.

If you're not sure whether you got paid, the right answer is Collect later. Clatri never invents a bank account to make a sale balance.

You can issue an invoice or record the sale without a document.

Quotes and invoices

A quote is an offer. It doesn't move anything: no income, no cash, no books. It's a promise, and promises aren't accounting.

When the customer accepts, you convert it to an invoice and that's when the income is born, with both documents linked so you can trace the whole path.

Documents have statuses —draft, issued, sent, accepted, rejected, void—, generate a PDF, and can be shared, printed or copied as text.

Your template

Not everyone issues "invoices". In Colombia an individual issues cuentas de cobro (bills of charge); elsewhere people talk about pro formas, sales notes or estimates. In Settings → Entity → Invoice template you decide what each document is called, its numbering prefix, the logo, the color, the issuer's details (name, ID, address, contact), the payment method you want printed, who signs, and a footer. Everything is optional: whatever you leave empty comes out as usual. Changing the prefix doesn't restart the numbering.

Voiding has a limit, and it's on purpose. You can only void a quote or an invoice that hasn't received any payment. An invoice that's already paid isn't voided: it's corrected with a credit note or a refund. Deleting the income and the real money to "cancel" it would be falsifying the past, and Clatri doesn't allow it.

Discovering it

If you have a personal entity with no businesses, Clatri offers it to you with a card: "Do you have a business? Sell, invoice and track inventory right here. No tax registration."

Because that's the point: you don't need to incorporate a company to keep your books as if you were one.

By chat

"create a business called Bakery", "record a sale of 12 loaves at 3,000 each, I was paid in cash", "make Marta a quote for 40 hours of consulting", "this month's rent goes 70% to the bakery and 30% to catering", "how did the bakery do in May?"