What is bookkeeping, and how does it differ from accounting?

In Turkey, ön muhasebe is the bookkeeping a business does day to day to record and track its commercial transactions. It covers invoices issued and received, what customers and vendors owe and are owed, cash and bank movements, checks and promissory notes given and received, and expenses. In other words, it tracks the documents and transactions that accounting entries are based on.

In many businesses, the company’s own staff keep these records, while an accountant (mali müşavir) or the accounting department prepares the statutory books and tax returns.

What does bookkeeping cover?

• Invoices: sales and purchase invoices. For businesses on e-Invoice (e-Fatura) and e-Archive, Turkey’s electronic invoice types, this also covers sending them and accepting incoming invoices.
• Customer and vendor accounts (cari hesap): what each customer and vendor owes and is owed, due dates, and balances, plus statements of account and balance confirmation.
• Cash and bank: cash in and out, bank transfers (havale and EFT), and reconciling bank statements with your records.
• Checks and promissory notes: due dates of the instruments in your portfolio, endorsing them, and handing them over for collection or as collateral.
• Expenses: employees’ expense receipts and the business’s general overheads.
• Collection and payment schedule: when each receivable should come in and when each payable has to be paid.

How is bookkeeping different from accounting?

General accounting (genel muhasebe) is the stage where transactions become journal entries under the chart of accounts and are posted to the statutory books, and where the trial balance, balance sheet, and income statement are produced. Under Article 182 of the Tax Procedure Law (Vergi Usul Kanunu, VUK), businesses on the balance-sheet basis keep a general journal (yevmiye defteri), a general ledger (defterikebir), and an inventory book (envanter defteri). Bookkeeping holds the documents and transactions those entries are based on.

The law also sets deadlines for recording. Under Article 219 of the VUK, a transaction can’t be entered in the books more than 10 days late. Where a business keeps its records through signed documents such as journal vouchers and payroll sheets, entering a transaction in those documents counts as entering it in the books, but it can’t be transferred to the main books more than 45 days later.

When bookkeeping and general accounting run in separate programs, the same invoice is entered twice, and differences often surface only when the two are compared at month-end.

Bookkeeping in IWB

In IWB, bookkeeping isn’t a separate program. Invoices live in Sales and Purchasing and employee expenses in Expenses, while customer and vendor accounts, cash, bank, checks, and notes live in Finance. Quotes carry over to orders, and orders to shipments and invoices, so no one retypes the exchange rate, VAT, or lines.

A sales invoice is issued as an e-Invoice or an e-Archive invoice, depending on whether the buyer is a registered e-Invoice user.

Bank transactions come in through your Finekra bank connection or a bank statement file; rules suggest matches, and you approve them. You can pull statements of account with aging, and the oldest debit is closed against the oldest credit. Checks, e-Checks, promissory notes, bills of exchange, and electronic warehouse receipts (ELÜS) are tracked in the portfolio.

Employees photograph their expense receipts with their phone camera, and a claim that passes review becomes a draft expense voucher.

Finance doesn’t create journal entries. Finance vouchers, check events, and cash and bank transactions go to your accountant’s posting queue in Accounting. There they’re previewed, posted one at a time or in bulk, and written to the books with an entry number.

If you turn on Accounting later, earlier documents are posted too. The month-end checklist flags entries where the document date and the posting date are more than 45 days apart. You can export the period’s journal lines from Accounting as a CSV file for your accountant.