Finance & accounting

How the books work

Every financial event in Kayan — a Shopify order, a purchase order receipt, a payroll run, an inventory adjustment — posts a balanced journal entry to the general ledger. Debits always equal credits. The books are always in balance.

You do not need to be an accountant to use Kayan. The platform generates the correct journal entries automatically. Finance teams can review, query, and export the underlying journals. Owners and operators see the results — P&L, cash position, margins — without needing to understand the entries.

Chart of accounts

When you create an organization, Kayan provisions a default chart of accounts (CoA) that covers the most common accounts for a product business:

• Assets — cash, accounts receivable, inventory, fixed assets, prepaid expenses.
• Liabilities — accounts payable, deferred revenue, accrued liabilities, VAT payable.
• Equity — owner's equity, retained earnings.
• Revenue — sales revenue, returns and allowances, other income.
• Cost of goods sold — cost of goods, inventory write-downs, shipping costs.
• Expenses — operating expenses, marketing, payroll, rent, depreciation.

You can add, rename, and reorganize accounts from Settings → Finance. Accounts used in posted journal entries cannot be deleted, but they can be archived to hide them from selection menus.

Accounts Receivable (AR)

When an order is placed, Kayan debits AR and credits Sales Revenue. When the payment is confirmed (via Shopify Payments, a bank match, or a manual receipt), Kayan clears the AR and posts Cash or the appropriate clearing account.

The AR Aging report shows all outstanding receivables grouped by how many days they have been open (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+), making it easy to chase overdue invoices and forecast incoming cash.

Accounts Payable (AP)

Purchase orders received into Kayan generate an AP entry (Dr Inventory / Cr AP). When you record a supplier payment, the AP is cleared. The AP Aging report works the same way as AR — grouped by days outstanding so you can manage cash flow and avoid late payment penalties.

Multi-currency

Kayan supports transactions in any currency. Your organization has a base currency (set during onboarding and configurable in Settings → Finance). Transactions in foreign currencies are recorded at the exchange rate on the transaction date and translated to the base currency for reporting.

• Unrealized FX gains/losses are calculated on open AR and AP balances at each reporting date.
• Realized FX gains/losses are posted when a foreign-currency receivable or payable is settled.
• Exchange rates can be entered manually or pulled from a connected rate feed.

Financial reports

Kayan generates three core financial statements from the general ledger on demand — no manual assembly required:

• Profit & Loss (P&L) — revenue, cost of goods sold, gross profit, operating expenses, and net income for any date range.
• Balance Sheet — assets, liabilities, and equity at any point in time.
• Cash Flow Statement — operating, investing, and financing activities for any period.

All reports can be filtered by date range, compared to a prior period, and exported to CSV or PDF.

Period close

You can lock any accounting period to prevent backdated changes. Once a period is closed, no journal entries can be posted into it — the system enforces this automatically, preventing the balance-sheet drift that comes from late adjustments.

Expense tracking

Operating expenses can be recorded manually, imported from a bank feed, or posted automatically by connected integrations (payroll). Each expense is assigned to an account and, optionally, a cost centre or project tag for segmented P&L analysis.