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The first step to submitting your user’s transactions is to map their real-world financial accounts, such as their bank account, to a corresponding ledger in their chart of accounts. The process works a bit differently depending on the end user’s accounting package.
  • PlatformGL
  • QuickBooks
1

Create a financial account ledger

Real-world financial accounts are represented by financial account ledgers. You create these ledgers like any ledger by using the Create Ledger endpoint.Financial account ledgers must have a financial_account_type. By selecting the financial account type, we set smart defaults to ensure that the accounting treatment is accurate. For example, setting financial_account_type to bank automatically sets type to asset, debit_credit to debit, and report_cash_flow to true.
Each real-world financial acount should have its own individual ledger. You can see the complete list of supported financial account types here.
2

Map the ledger

Once you have created a financial account ledger, you must store the association between the ledger_id of the financial account ledger and the real-world financial account it represents.We call this mapping, and you will use this mapping for various use cases such as submitting transactions.
3

Set the opening balance

It is important that the balance of the financial account ledger matches that of the real-world financial account on your user’s start date, or else their accounting will be inaccurate.If the real-world financial account was opened before your user’s start date, an opening balance must be set via the Opening Balance endpoint.

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Best practices

If you already have access to financial accounts for the customer, for example, because you already serve them a banking or payroll product, then it’s a good idea to create a ledger for each financial account as soon as you create the user’s account in Teal.
When creating a financial account ledger, it’s important to give it a descriptive name so the end user can distinguish which account is which in case they ever open a 2nd account of the same type. We recommend using a naming convention that includes the last 4 digits of the account number, which is generally considered not to be sensitive information. For security and compliance reasons, we do not recommend including any more digits than the last four.For example, “Chase Checking **5959” is a good name for a ledger, whereas “Bank Account 1” is not.
If you control the financial account (e.g. via a neobanking/Baas offering), then you may want to make the ledger non-user-editable by setting the editable parameter to False when using the Create Ledger endpoint. This will prevent the user from editing any line entry that is assigned to the ledger. They will still be able to categorize the transactions and edit the rest of the journal entry. This feature ensures that the user does not accidently break the sync between the Teal ledger and the transactions submitted from the financial account.For example, if you submit a transaction for a $10 expense for “Starbucks” using the Create Transaction endpoint, Teal will automatically generate a journal entry with two line entries. One line entry will credit $10 to the bank account ledger, the other line entry will debit $10 to an expense ledger (depending on your auto-categorization config). If the bank account ledger is set to editable = False, then the user will be able to change the $10 debit to the expense ledger, but not the $10 credit to the bank account ledger.