The general ledger
Your chart of accounts, how everyday shop work posts to your books automatically, and reading an account's journal.
Meridian keeps a real general ledger behind the scenes — every invoice, payment, and received purchase order posts to your books automatically, so your chart of accounts stays current without anyone keying journal entries by hand. You'll mostly visit it to set the accounts up once, to check a balance, or to see exactly what's behind a number.
Open the Chart of Accounts. In the sidebar, expand Accounting and click Chart of Accounts. Accounts are grouped the standard bookkeeping way — Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Revenue, Expenses — with a summary card and running total for each group. Every account row shows its Code, Account Name, Subtype, Normal Bal., and Balance.
Starting fresh? Load the defaults. A brand-new shop shows No GL accounts yet. Click Load Defaults (or Load Default GL on the empty screen) to add roughly sixty standard automotive-shop accounts — cash, receivables, parts, labor, sales, sales tax, and the rest. Codes that already exist are skipped, so it's safe to run. Need one of your own? Click New Account and fill in the New GL Account window: Account Code, Account Type, Account Name, and, if you like, a Subtype and Normal Balance.
Know what posts on its own. You rarely touch the ledger directly because the day's work writes to it for you. In plain terms: invoicing a ticket raises your revenue (labor, parts, sublet, fees, sales tax) and what customers owe you; recording a payment moves that money out of receivables and into cash; receiving a purchase order brings the parts in and creates the vendor bill you'll see in Accounts Payable. Void any of those and Meridian reverses the matching entries so the books stay square.
Drill into an account to see the detail. Click any account name to open its journal — every entry that touched it, with Date, Reference, Description, Debit, Credit, and a running Balance. Use the period chips to narrow to a month. This is where "why is this balance what it is?" gets answered without a spreadsheet.
Export for your accountant. Click Export to download the ledger as a CSV — the file your bookkeeper or accountant can pull straight into their own system.
What happens behind the scenes
This is the ledger, so "behind the scenes" is the scenes — but the point is that you don't drive it. When an advisor invoices a repair order, the sale lands in your revenue accounts and the customer's balance goes into receivables in the same motion. When that customer pays, the money shifts from receivables into cash. When parts arrive against a purchase order, your inventory value goes up and a bill to the vendor is recorded. Each of those is a balanced entry — debits equal credits — created automatically, and voiding the source document writes the offsetting entry rather than erasing history. Loading the default chart only adds accounts; it never changes balances or existing data. Exporting is read-only — it copies the journal out, it doesn't move anything.
Troubleshooting
A new shop starts with no accounts. Click Load Defaults to seed the standard automotive-shop chart, or Add Manually to build your own. Until accounts exist, automatic posting has nowhere to land, so do this before you start invoicing.
Some accounts are marked (system) — Meridian relies on them for automatic posting (cash, receivables, sales tax, and so on) and won't let you delete them. That's expected; leave them in place.
If an account already has ledger entries, deleting it would orphan history, so Meridian deactivates it instead — it stops appearing for new work but its past entries stay intact. Truly unused accounts delete cleanly.
Click into the account and read its journal. Every debit and credit that built the balance is listed with the date and a reference back to the document behind it, so you can trace an unexpected number to the exact invoice or payment that caused it.