Money locations & balances
A money location is any place your money actually sits: the cash box, the MTN MoMo wallet, the Airtel wallet, a bank account, a card terminal, a till float, petty cash.
Getting these right is the foundation. Every transaction names one, and your balances are only as true as this list.
Setting them up
Add one for each real place money lives. Each has:
- A name you would recognise — "Main till", "MTN business wallet", "Stanbic current account"
- A type — cash, mobile wallet, bank, or card
- A currency — see Multi-currency
- An opening balance — what is genuinely there right now
Count, don't estimate
Open the cash box and count it. Check the wallet balance on your phone. An opening balance you rounded to look tidy is an error that follows you through every future reconciliation.
Card terminals are their own location
If you take cards — an Interac or debit terminal, Stripe, Square, Moneris, PayPal — give it its own location rather than filing the takings under the bank account they eventually land in.
The two are genuinely different pots at any moment: a Friday's card sales sit with the processor until they settle, often days later. Recording them straight into the bank makes both wrong — the bank shows money it does not have yet, and the card float shows nothing at all — and the bank reconciliation then refuses to tie for a reason nobody can find.
Changing a location after you have created it
The name and provider can be changed at any time.
The kind — cash, wallet, bank, card — can only be corrected while nothing has been posted to it. Once entries exist they are already in the ledger account for that kind of location, and changing the label afterwards would leave your books disagreeing with what the screen says. If you need to change it later, create the right location and move the balance across.
Removing a location
Under Edit → Remove this location. SBB tells you what will happen before anything happens, because there are two different outcomes:
- Deleted for good — nothing in your books refers to it. This is the "I created it by mistake" case.
- Archived — something does refer to it: a transaction, a shift, a reconciliation. It disappears from new transactions and every figure it is part of stays exactly as it is. It cannot be deleted, because those entries have to keep pointing somewhere.
If the location still holds money, you choose where the money goes first, and SBB records a real transfer. It is never quietly zeroed — the money has to be seen to move, or your books stop balancing.
One location per real place
The most common setup mistake is too few locations. If cash sits in a till and a safe, those are two locations. If you have MTN and Airtel wallets, those are two locations, not one "mobile money".
Merging them hides exactly the thing you need to see — which specific place is short.
Balances
The Balances screen shows what each location holds now, and total balance movement over a period.
Your balances should match reality at all times. When they do not, one of three things has happened: a transaction was not recorded, one was recorded twice, or one was recorded against the wrong location. All three are found the same way — reconciliation.
Transfers
Moving money between your own locations — banking the day's takings, topping up a float from the bank — is a transfer, not income or expense.
Recording a transfer as income is the second most common bookkeeping error in a small business. It inflates revenue and makes the P&L fiction. Cash out of the till and into the bank has not earned you anything.
Locations vs branches
A money location is where money sits. A branch is where business happens. A shop with two tills and a safe has three money locations and one branch. Businesses in three towns have three branches, each with their own money locations.
Daily habit
At close of day, count each location and compare. Two minutes daily beats a weekend of forensic work at month-end — and a difference found today is usually explainable, while one found in six weeks usually is not.