Coding Rules and the Outbound Mirror
Rules turn a recurring incoming transaction into a coded posting without anybody looking at it. A monthly direct debit to the same supplier for the same purpose should not need twelve human decisions a year.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → ERP - Finance:
- Accounting Code Map — the coding rules
- Accounting Outbox — postings queued for an external package
- Feed Queue — where unmatched items surface
Deterministic first
Rules are evaluated before any AI-assisted suggestion is considered. The ordering is deliberate and worth understanding.
A rule you wrote produces the same answer every time and can be pointed at when somebody asks why a transaction was coded a particular way. A suggestion is a guess, however good — and "the system suggested it" is not an answer an auditor accepts.
So anything you can express as a rule, express as a rule. Reserve assistance for the genuinely ambiguous residue, and treat its output as a proposal for a person to accept.
Writing a rule
A rule matches on what the incoming transaction contains — the counterparty, the reference, the amount, the direction — and sets what it should become: the account, and any analysis dimensions you use.
Match on the most stable attribute available. A supplier's name in a bank narrative is more durable than a reference number that changes monthly.
Order and specificity
Put specific rules before general ones. A rule catching everything from one supplier will swallow the one transaction from that supplier that should have been treated differently, and it will do so silently. Review the order whenever you add a rule, not only when something goes wrong.
Keep the set small
A rule set nobody understands is worse than no rules, because its mistakes are systematic rather than occasional. Periodically review which rules are actually firing and delete the ones that are not — a rule matching a supplier you stopped using two years ago is a trap waiting for a similarly-named new one.
The outbound mirror
Where you keep an external accounting package alongside the ledger, Accounting Outbox queues postings to be pushed out, driven by the Accounting Outbound Mirror task.
This is a mirror, not a handover — the ledger remains the system of record. Watch the outbox for items failing repeatedly; they usually mean a code mapping the external package will not accept, and each retry is time you may not have before a filing deadline.
Worked example
A business writes eleven rules covering rent, utilities, insurance, payroll and its five largest suppliers. Those cover about 80% of bank volume. The remaining 20% is worked by hand each week, and any transaction appearing three times by hand becomes rule twelve.
Recommendations
- Write a rule when a manual coding recurs three times, not before.
- Specific before general, and re-check the order on every addition.
- Sample automatically-coded items occasionally — a good rule set fails by quietly continuing after an assumption changed.
- Investigate a second outbox failure rather than retrying.