Your accountant sends the monthly file. You open it, and there are eighty-odd lines with words like “Contra” and “Journal” against them. You sign what you are told to sign. Somewhere in that list is the reason your bank balance and your profit figure do not agree, and you have no way to find it.
That gap is not an accounting problem. It is a vocabulary problem. There are only six kinds of accounting vouchers in day to day use, and once you can name them, most of the month makes sense in about ten minutes.
A voucher is just a labelled event
Every entry in your books records one thing that happened. A voucher is the label that says what kind of thing it was.
The label matters because it decides two accounts: the one that goes up and the one that goes down. Get the label right and the reports downstream, your GST returns, your ageing, your profit and loss, all come out right without anyone patching them by hand later.
That is the whole idea. Not a filing convention. Not something for the accounts team to worry about while you look at the summary. The voucher type is the single decision that determines whether a transaction lands in receivables, in expenses, or nowhere useful at all.
The six accounting vouchers, in plain language
Sales
You raised an invoice. The customer now owes you money.
A sales voucher does two things at once: it books revenue, and it creates a debtor. The cash has not arrived. That is not an oversight, it is the point. Revenue and cash are different events and they get different vouchers.
If your sales figure for the month looks healthy and your bank does not, this is usually why. You have sold. You have not been paid.
Purchase
A supplier raised an invoice on you. You now owe them money.
The mirror image of sales. It books the cost or the asset, and it creates a creditor. Again, no money has moved.
The common error here is booking a purchase only when you pay it. Do that and your costs land in the wrong month, your margins jump around for no reason, and your input credit sits unclaimed because the bill was never entered.
Receipt
Money came in.
A receipt voucher records cash or a bank credit arriving and, critically, knocks it off against the invoice it settles. That last part is where most books go quietly wrong. If a receipt is entered without being applied to specific invoices, the total looks right and the ageing is nonsense. You will have a customer showing three lakh outstanding who has actually paid two of the four bills.
Payment
Money went out.
Supplier payments, salaries, rent, statutory dues, the electricity bill. Same rule as receipt in reverse: apply it to the bill it settles wherever a bill exists.
A payment against a supplier invoice reduces what you owe. A payment with no bill behind it, like a direct expense, books the expense there and then. Both are legitimate. They just are not the same thing, and a team that treats them as the same ends up with a creditors list full of ghosts.
Journal
Something changed in the books, but no money moved.
Depreciation. A provision for a doubtful debt. Writing off a small balance. Reclassifying an amount posted to the wrong head. A year end adjustment your CA asks for.
Journal is the honest, useful voucher that gets abused more than any other. Because it can post anything to anything, an untrained hand will use it to fix things that should have been fixed at source. If your file has a large number of journals, that is not sophistication. It is usually a sign that sales, purchase, receipt and payment entries were made carelessly and someone is patching them afterwards.
Contra
Your own money moved from one of your own pots to another.
Cash deposited into the bank. Cash withdrawn for petty expenses. A transfer between two current accounts. Nothing was earned, nothing was spent, nothing is owed. Your total position is unchanged.
Contra exists so that these moves do not pollute your income and expenses. Book a bank to bank transfer as a payment and a receipt instead, and you have just invented turnover that never happened.
Why the familiar layout is not a compromise
There is a temptation, when a business moves to new software, to redesign the accounting screens into something friendlier. Drop the voucher names. Call everything a transaction. Hide the debit and credit columns behind a wizard.
It sounds like a kindness to the owner. In practice it costs you three things.
First, your accountant already knows this layout. Whether they sit in your office or come in for two days a month, they were trained on it, they have worked in it for years, and they can spot a wrong entry in a voucher register faster than you can explain a new interface to them. Retraining a competent accountant on invented terminology is a real cost with no benefit at the end of it.
Second, the vocabulary is shared across the whole ecosystem. Your CA, your auditor, the article who comes for GST reconciliation, the person you hire when the current accountant leaves. Say “contra” and every one of them knows exactly what you mean. Say “internal transfer type B” and you are explaining your own software to professionals for the rest of its life.
Third, and this is the one owners underrate: accounting vouchers are a discipline, not just a format. Forcing every entry to declare which of the six it is prevents a large class of mistakes at the point of entry rather than at audit. A wizard that guesses on your behalf removes the decision and, with it, the control.
BizvoraOne keeps the Tally-style voucher layout in its Accounting and Recovery module for exactly these reasons. Not because change is hard, but because the format is a good one and your accountant’s fluency in it is an asset you already own.
The point of familiar accounting vouchers is not nostalgia. It is that the person checking your books should never have to translate before they can start.
What the person signing the cheques should actually check
You do not need to make entries. You do need to be able to interrogate them. Five checks, none of which take long.
- Pull the voucher register for the month and look at the mix. Sales and purchase should dominate in a trading or manufacturing business. Receipts and payments should track your bank activity. If journals are a large slice of the register, ask why.
- Ask for the list of receipts not applied to any invoice. Every unapplied receipt is a customer whose balance is wrong in one direction or another.
- Check that every contra has a matching pair in the bank statement. Cash withdrawals in particular. This is the entry most often used to hide a mess.
- Look at one journal in detail, chosen at random. Ask what happened, who authorised it, and why it could not have been booked correctly at source. One question a month keeps the habit honest.
- Reconcile creditors against the physical bills file. Purchase vouchers with no bill behind them, and bills with no purchase voucher, both cause trouble at return filing time.
Run that list once a month and you will know more about your own books than most owners of businesses your size.
Where vouchers stop being an accounts problem
The six vouchers only tell you what happened. They do not tell you what to do next.
A sales voucher creates a debtor. Whether anyone chases that debtor is a separate question, and the answer usually depends on whether receivables are visible to someone with a name and a phone. If your ageing lives in a report nobody opens, the voucher was recorded perfectly and the money still did not come in. The practical fix is a short ageing view that people actually read, built around four buckets and one named owner per bucket.
There is a second gap on the other side. The customer in your books and the customer in your pipeline are often two different records with slightly different names, and the sales team has no idea that the account they are quoting to is ninety days overdue. Closing that requires the ledger and the pipeline to point at the same customer, which is a smaller job than it sounds and is covered in connecting your CRM to your books.
What to do first
Open last month’s voucher register. Not the profit and loss, the register itself.
Count the journals. Then count the receipts that are not applied to a specific invoice. Those two numbers, on their own, tell you whether your accounting vouchers are being used as a record of what happened or as a place to tidy things up afterwards.
If both numbers are small, your books are in better shape than you thought and you can spend your attention on collections instead. If either is large, you have found a specific, fixable thing, and you now have the vocabulary to ask about it directly.
