The general ledger side of Zeno: chart of accounts, bank feeds, transaction review, and vendor rules.
Books is where every financial action in Zeno lands. Invoices, bills, payments, and bank-feed transactions all post to the general ledger here. The Chart of Accounts defines the buckets; Registers show what’s in each; Review is where you approve incoming bank-feed activity.You don’t need to open Books to use Zeno day-to-day — the other modules post to it automatically.To give an investor, accountant, or partner a read-only view of specific projects, see Sharing Books.
Connected bank feeds pull in transactions once a day, overnight. They land in Review as pending until you approve them — this is where the bulk of day-to-day bookkeeping happens.The page shows pending transactions with columns for Date, Payee, Account, Category, and Amount. Rows missing a category are highlighted in amber.To approve a transaction, click a row to set its category and (optionally) property. Check the box and click Approve, or click Approve N (where N is the number of checked rows) to batch-approve multiple. Vendor Rules auto-fill the category whenever a merchant pattern matches.Filter by account or search by payee, memo, or amount. When the queue is empty you’ll see an “All caught up” confirmation.Transactions that don’t belong in the books can be ignored. Click Ignored above the list to review them and restore any back to pending.
The row of account chips above the search box filters the queue. Each chip carries its pending count; the first four accounts get a chip and the rest sit under Other accounts.Chips stay in the order you set on the Books dashboard — see Ordering your accounts — so an account keeps its spot whether it has forty items pending or none. Approving work never reshuffles the row under your cursor.Pick an account and the row collapses to that one chip. From there:
Change reopens the full row to switch accounts.
Register opens that account’s register, to check that what you just approved landed where you expected.
Set up Vendor Rules for your recurring merchants. Once a rule exists, matching transactions arrive pre-categorized and need only a click to approve.
A Register is the per-account ledger — every transaction that hit that bank, credit card, or GL account, in date order with a running balance.Registers (sidebar) lists all accounts. Click one to open its register. From there you can edit a transaction inline, drill into the source document (invoice, bill, or feed item), or jump to reconciliation.
The Bank & credit accounts panel on the Books dashboard is the one place you set account order. Hover a row, grab the handle on its left, and drag it where you want it. The order is saved in your browser, per organization, and survives reloads.Bank and cash accounts always sit above credit cards — you can reorder within each group, but you can’t drag a card up past the divider. A newly connected account joins the end of its group until you move it.Review reads the same order for its account chips, so the two pages agree. The order is yours alone; it doesn’t change what your coworkers see.If a bank-feed transaction was approved by mistake, open it from the register and click Send back to bank feed. The posting is removed and the item returns to Review as pending.
Open from a register via Reconcile. Enter the statement’s ending balance and date — or import the statement and let Zeno read both off it — then tick transactions as cleared. When the cleared total matches the statement, the account is reconciled.Reconciled transactions can’t be deleted without first un-reconciling the period.See Reconciling an account for the statement pane, auto-matching, and working a difference that won’t clear.
Your list of GL accounts (Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expense). Add, rename, archive, and set the parent hierarchy here.Most organizations start from a template and only add accounts when they need a new category. The Chart is shared across all modules — a rental invoice and a contractor invoice can both post to the same Rental Income account if you want them to.
Sales Tax lists the returns your organization has filed, newest period first, with where each one stands and what it was for. Supported forms are NJ ST-50 (quarterly sales & use tax), NJ ST-51 (monthly payment), and NY ST-100 (quarterly sales & use tax).Open a return for the money lines as they appear on the printed form, its paperwork, and everything you can do to it. Status isn’t edited directly: a draft becomes filed when you record the state’s acknowledgement, a filed return becomes superseded when you amend it, and a duplicate is voided with a reason. Each action leaves a dated note.
Auto-categorization for bank-feed transactions and parsed documents. A rule pairs conditions — payer name, memo, amount range, account — with a resolution: the vendor, the GL account, and where to route the cost.Rules fire at ingest, so matching items arrive already categorized and need only a click to approve. Open Zeno → Knowledge & rules → Rules to write one.See Rules for conditions, testing a rule before you save it, applying rules to the queue you already have, and how a repeated habit becomes a suggested rule.
Bank connections are managed from Settings → Bank Feeds. Connect an institution, then map each feed to the GL account you want transactions to post to.Feeds sync once a day, overnight. New transactions appear in Review the next morning.
