Anatomy of a posted day

The accounting feed shows you a day balances. This page is the level below that: the exact debits and credits behind a posted day, and how the shape changes depending on how you post. It’s the page to hand your accountant when they want to know precisely what Swann Retail writes to your books.

The three shapes

Every posted day is double-entry — debits equal credits — but the QuickBooks record it lands as depends on your posting style:

Posting style	The record in QuickBooks
Daily summary	one journal entry a day — the balanced day below, posted almost verbatim.
Each sale	one sales receipt per sale (a refund receipt for a return), itemised by product.
Daily invoice	one invoice a day, itemised by product, that clears itself to zero.

A daily-summary journal, line by line

A daily summary posts the day’s takings as one journal entry against the accounts you mapped. These lines always carry the day:

Line	Side	What it is
Accounts Receivable	Debit	the cash actually taken that day — the clearing leg that lands in your bank.
Sales Discounts	Debit	discounts you gave, reducing revenue.
Sales Returns	Debit	refunds you processed, reducing revenue.
Cost of Goods Sold	Debit	the cost of what you sold, moved out of stock.
Sales Revenue	Credit	your gross sales for the day.
VAT Payable	Credit	the VAT you collected, owed onward.
Inventory	Credit	the matching reduction in stock value against Cost of Goods Sold.

A line only posts when it carries a figure, so a quiet day is shorter — a merchant who charges no VAT never posts a VAT Payable line at all.

The lines that appear when the day calls for them

Three more lines join only when that day has the movement, so a plain cash-and-carry day never shows them:

• Customer Deposits — the bridge between money earned and money collected. It’s a credit on a day you take a deposit (cash in the drawer you haven’t earned yet) and a debit on a day you fulfil one (earned now, collected earlier). This is why a day always balances even when the deposit and the pickup fall on different days — see Deposits & balances.
• Tips, Service Charge, Surcharge — each add-on you took that day, posted as a credit to its own income account.
• Forfeited Deposits — a credit for a deposit (or restocking fee) you kept when a custom order was cancelled, recognised as income.

Each sale, and daily invoice

The other two styles carry the same takings in a different QuickBooks record:

• Each sale posts an itemised sales receipt per sale — a line per product at its net-of-discount price, the VAT as tax lines, against the products and tax codes you mapped. A return posts the same shape as a refund receipt. These receipts land in Undeposited Funds and are billed to a default walk-in customer, so QuickBooks derives the day’s totals from the individual sales rather than from one journal.
• Daily invoice posts one itemised invoice a day that clears itself to zero — the day’s product lines as positive amounts, then one negative clearing line per payment type (cash, card, cheque) that cancels them out. It bills a single house customer and is built to match the Amaka Loyverse→QuickBooks feed, so a day looks the same in your books as it did before you moved across.

Whichever style you post, the figures reconcile to the same balanced day — the accounting feed is where you see that they add up.

The reference on every day

Every posted day carries a stable reference built from its date, so you can always find it in QuickBooks and re-posting never creates a second copy:

• A daily summary posts under SWANN-2026-05-31.
• A daily invoice posts under SWANN-INV-2026-05-31.

Search that reference in QuickBooks to open the exact record, then compare it against this anatomy. To tie a stretch of days out against your books, see Reconciling your books.