What an adjustment is
Open Adjustments, under the "Financials" tools card (or the "Financials" group on desktop). An adjustment is an entry an accountant makes at the end of a month or year: it changes your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Trial Balance without any money moving. Each one is marked ADJUSTMENT everywhere it lands, and every change is kept in the Audit Log. The screen is laid out like the Asset Register: pick the tax year with ‹ › at the top, then 📋 Overview says what that year's adjustments did to your profit, kind by kind; ➕ New has a form for each kind; and 🧾 Posted lists everything dated in that year, with Remove (or Undo on a write-off). One you set to undo itself, dated on the last day of a tax year (28 or 29 February), shows in the next year as the opposite, on its own line marked as last year's, undone.
- Supplier invoice still to come: a cost of this period whose invoice hasn't arrived yet — say August's electricity, billed in September. It counts in August.
- Paid in advance: something paid now that covers a later period, like a year's insurance. Give the part still to be used; it comes off this period's costs.
- Work done, not yet invoiced: income earned this period that you'll invoice later. It counts now.
- For those three, Worklog asks: Undo it the next day? Pick Undo it when the real thing will be logged in Worklog later — the supplier invoice, or your invoice — so it isn't counted twice. Pick Keep it for a year-end figure from your accountant that nothing later replaces; it stays until you move it with a Correction. Nothing is picked for you. If you undo one dated the day before a tax year ends — 28 February in a leap year, when the year ends on the 29th — Worklog warns you: it would undo itself inside the same year and count in none.
- Correction: pick where the amount is now and where it belongs — a cost logged under the wrong category, a personal cost logged as the business's (it moves to drawings), a loan repayment logged as a cost (it pays the loan down), or an error from an earlier year.
- Customer won't pay: write off an invoice that will never be paid — see below.
- Paid from own pocket: a business cost you paid with your own money or card, so no business account shows it. Pick the cost category, give the amount you paid (VAT and all: an adjustment claims no VAT, so the whole amount is the cost) and say whether you want it back — no, and it counts as money you put in; yes, and it is a loan from you. It stays. Got the tax invoice? Log it as a purchase instead, so its VAT can be claimed.
- Interest on a loan: interest added to a loan without any money moving. Interest the business owes is a cost and the loan grows by it; interest owed to the business is income, and what it is owed grows by it. It stays.
What adjustments can't change
Adjustments never touch your bank or cash, VAT, customers, suppliers, stock or equipment — each of those has its own screen, and changing it by adjustment would make that screen and your Balance Sheet disagree. If money was logged wrong, fix the entry itself. Tax payments, VAT and PAYE paid over, loans' capital, asset purchases and costs SARS doesn't allow aren't offered either, because the tax screens read those straight from your entries. Nor is Bad debts as a category: a bad debt is written off with Customer won't pay, which closes the invoice — a journal to Bad debts would leave the customer still owing it.
Write off a customer who won't pay
When a customer is never going to pay, open Adjustments, tap ➕ New, then Customer won't pay. Every invoice still owed is listed, oldest first; pick the one, then give the day you decided it was lost and why — SARS allows a bad debt once it has actually been written off, and your reason is the record that it was. The sale stays in your books; what they still owed becomes a bad-debt cost that day, the invoice closes and is marked WRITTEN OFF.
- VAT: on the invoice basis you declared the VAT when the invoice went out, so the VAT inside what you wrote off comes back to you on VAT201 field 17. On the payments basis a smaller sale gets no bad-debt relief: VAT Act section 22(1), further proviso (ii), bars it for a vendor who accounts on the payments basis, except for a supply to which section 9(2)(b) or 9(3)(c) applies (Worklog does not handle those). A sale of R100 000 or more is outside that bar, because section 15(2A) makes you account for it on the invoice basis (SARS's VAT 404 guide, section 9.2), so its write-off comes back on field 17 like any invoice-basis one.
- If they pay after all, log the money in Banking → + Add as money in, filed as "Bad debt recovered" — it is income in the month it arrives, and its VAT is output VAT then.
- The write-off is listed with your adjustments, and in their PDF and CSV. Undo on it is for a write-off made by mistake: it takes the cost and the VAT claim back out of the month they were in and the invoice is owed again. Once the VAT201 for that month is marked filed, undo is refused — the return SARS has would no longer match. Unmark that VAT201 first if the write-off really was a mistake.
- For the same reason, a write-off can't be dated inside a period whose VAT201 is already marked filed: its VAT would land on a return SARS already has. Date it on a day no filed return covers.
- It is done only here, not on the invoice: whether a debt is lost is a call for whoever does your books.
- A written-off invoice is never sent to the customer: opening it shows what was written off and when, and it has no PDF, CSV or WhatsApp — it wasn't paid in full, and nothing should tell them it was.
- An invoice from before your books started can be written off only once it is in your Opening Balances (step 5) — until then your books don't count it as owed.
- Writing off, or undoing a write-off, needs Adjustments at Edit, because it changes your profit and your VAT return — and Invoices at View, because it closes or reopens an invoice.
Who can post them
Owners can always post adjustments. A team member who can open your Balance Sheet can see them; to let a bookkeeper or accountant post them too, give them Adjustments at Edit on the Team screen. A business in read-only mode can see its adjustments but not add them.
Send them to your accountant
- 📄 PDF and 📊 CSV / Excel at the bottom list every adjustment, line by line, with its debits and credits.