Dolibarr accounting: the settings to make before your first entry

Why you set up before you write

An accounting entry generated with the wrong account cannot be fixed with one click when there are hundreds of them. You have to unlink it from its document, link it to the right account, then generate it again. Over a full financial year, that means hours of work, and your accountant has to review everything. Most of the time, the error comes from a setting missed at the start: a default account left empty, a chart of accounts that does not match the country, a missing journal. Dolibarr's accounting module does not guess how you are organised. It applies what you have configured. The rule is simple: do not validate any invoice meant for accounting until the settings below are agreed with your accountant. Plan a working session with them before you start. They will tell you which accounts they use, how they split the journals and which export format they expect. Write these decisions down. They will be your reference from then on.

Choose and load the chart of accounts

The first step is to enable the accounting module, then choose the chart of accounts for your country. Dolibarr offers standard charts for several countries, including the ones where we work most. For a French company, the plan comptable général (the French standard chart of accounts) is the starting point. For Luxembourg or Belgium, check that the chart you load matches the standard your firm applies. Once the chart is imported, compare it with your accountant's. You will often find accounts you do not need, which you can deactivate, and missing auxiliary or analytical accounts, which you will have to create. Avoid deleting accounts that are already in use: deactivate them instead. One point to watch: decide from the start whether you manage auxiliary accounts per customer and per supplier. This choice affects all the linking that follows, and changing it during the year means redoing entries. If your accountant works with collective accounts, follow their practice.

Define the journals and the financial year

Journals split your entries by type: sales, purchases, bank, miscellaneous operations. Dolibarr lets you set them up with a code and a type. Copy your firm's codes exactly. If your accountant imports your file into their own tool, an unknown journal code will cause a rejection or a manual reassignment. Check the periods too. Create the financial year with its exact start and end dates before any linking. An invoice dated outside the financial year will not be handled as you expect. If you take over an activity during the year, ask your firm for the opening balance and agree how to bring it in: through an opening entry (écriture d'à-nouveaux), or by starting Dolibarr at the beginning of a financial year. Either way, the decision is made before the first entry, never after.

• Copy the firm's journal codes exactly.
• Create the financial year with its exact dates before any linking.
• Decide how to bring in the opening balance.
• Deactivate unneeded accounts instead of deleting them.

Fill in the default accounts

Default accounts are the safety net of your accounting. When a product, a service or a third party has no account of its own, Dolibarr uses the default value. If it is empty, the line stays unlinked and blocks the next steps. Fill in all of them: product sales, service sales, purchases, VAT collected, deductible VAT, customer and supplier accounts, bank, shipping costs, membership fees, and donations if you are an association. Then refine record by record. A product sold for export, or a service under a different VAT regime, needs its own account. The gain is real on product records: entering the accounting account when you create the product saves you from looking for it at linking time. Also check the VAT accounts by rate. An error here distorts your VAT returns, not just your entries. Have your firm review this list before you move on.

Link sales and purchases to accounting

Dolibarr does not generate entries when you validate an invoice. It goes through a linking step: lines of customer and supplier invoices are attached to an account, then transferred to the general ledger. This step is your checkpoint. Run a first test on a small batch of invoices, for example those of a single month. Check that each line carries the right account, that VAT comes out correctly and that the totals of each document balance. Correct any anomalies on this batch before going further. If a linking rule causes a problem, you change it once, instead of reworking hundreds of lines. Do the same for expense reports and payments if you track them. To understand the purchasing side upstream, our article on structuring supplier purchases covers the preparation of records and orders. On the bank side, bank reconciliation completes the chain.

The workflow with your accountant and your next action

You still need to decide how entries reach your firm. There are three ways: exporting the general ledger in a format they can import, direct access to your instance, or synchronisation with their software. For the last one, the DolicraftPennylane module sends invoices, third parties and products to an accounting platform, if your firm uses it. Whichever way you choose, set a rhythm: monthly if possible, with a period closing that prevents changes to documents already sent. Also agree who corrects what, to avoid double entry. Your next action: bring together your accountant and the person who enters invoices, go through the chart, journals and default accounts together, then test on one month. If you prefer support, our implementation team can prepare this setup with you, and you can contact us to discuss it.