Record manual journal entries, split costs with analytic distribution, and lock the books

Posting a line whose analytic distribution names two projects creates one Analytic Item per project, each carrying its share of the amount. Transactions › Analytic Items is that ledger: date, description, one column per plan (Project, Department, Product Line), and the amount, with graph and pivot views for slicing profitability. The screen opens pre-filtered to the current fiscal year and profit-and-loss accounts — group by an analytic account for per-project totals, and clear those filter chips if you are looking for older items or balance-sheet postings and the list seems mysteriously empty.

There is no separate "assign this entry to a project" step: the analytic distribution widget on the journal line (or invoice line) is the only doorway, so a cost booked without it simply never appears in any project's analytics. Automatic assignment rules can be configured under Configuration › Analytic Accounting › Analytic Distribution Models (see the configuration article).

Review › Control › Journal Items is the line-level ledger — every debit and credit, filterable by journal type, account type (Receivable, Payable, P&L Accounts), Posted/Unposted, Unreconciled, and To Review, and groupable by account, partner, journal, or entry. The list is multi-edit-capable: tick rows, change a field once, and it applies to the selection. It is where month-end questions ("what hit this account in July?") get answered without printing anything.

Review › Logs › Audit Trail lists the system's field-change log entries for journal entries, accounts, taxes, partners, and the company — who changed what, when. Read its scope honestly: it records changes to tracked fields only (the same entries you see in a record's chatter log), not every modification of every field, and it is not the tamper-evidence mechanism — that is Secure Entries, below.

Accounting › Actions › Lock Dates opens the Lock your Fiscal Period dialog with three dates:

Update writes the dates onto the company; only accounting administrators may execute it. Treat Lock Everyone with the respect its help text demands — it is irreversible by design, and the system refuses to hard-lock a period that still contains draft entries or unreconciled bank statement lines, telling you to post or delete them first.

Accounting › Closing › Secure Entries goes one step beyond locking: it chains the posted entries up to your chosen date into a cryptographic hash sequence, making any later alteration detectable. The wizard shows exactly which entries will be secured and warns about anything in the way — draft entries before the date, unreconciled bank statement lines (those journals are skipped), entries that cannot be hashed, or sequence gaps the operation would create. Securing is manual, per company, and the menu itself is hidden behind a dedicated access group, so on most databases only the adviser who closes the year will ever see it.

"The entry is not balanced." — debits and credits differ; fix the lines before saving. Saving several entries at once lists the unbalanced ones by name.

"You are not allowed to execute this action." — the Lock Dates Update button requires the accounting administrator role.

"A new Hard Lock Date must be posterior (or equal) to the previous one." / "The Hard Lock Date cannot be removed." — the hard lock only moves forward; there is no undo, which is the point of it.

"There are still draft entries in the period you want to hard lock." — post or delete them; the warning links to the offending entries. The same applies to unreconciled bank statement lines.

"Set a date. The moves will be secured up to including this date." — Secure Entries needs the cut-off date filled in.

Analytic Items looks empty though costs were posted — either the default fiscal-year/P&L filters are hiding them, or the journal lines were posted without an analytic distribution; check one line under Journal Items.