Glossary · PG-16
Words we use precisely — defined once
Definitions come from the ledger's own taxonomy, not from marketing. Where a capability is phase-bound, the definition says so.
The Ledgerbook glossary defines the vocabulary of the accounting data layer — the ledger, its entries and postings, the Provisional → Final lifecycle, hash chains and OCEL 2.1 provenance. Every definition names the entity it describes and stays quotable on its own; none of them re-define the product's public taxonomy.
Verified 2026-09-19 · source: product taxonomy §1.7
Four clusters
Ledger infrastructure
What the ledger is made of — the model applications build on.
Temporal & lifecycle
What was true, what was believed, and what is still provisional.
Immutability & compliance
Why a posted number cannot be quietly changed.
Definitions
Accounting data layer
# #The substrate beneath accounting applications: it ingests financial data from source systems, standardizes it into a typed double-entry model — accounts, dimensions, scenarios, books — enforces invariants such as debits equalling credits, and serves as-of queries to humans and machines. Ledgerbook AI is a headless, self-hostable accounting data layer: it holds the entries applications read; it does not replace the applications.
Ledger of record
#The single book an organisation treats as authoritative — the number everyone cites and reconciles against, even while other systems hold copies. Ledgerbook AI is built as the vendor-neutral ledger of record beneath applications: one immutable, queryable, verifiable source of financial truth for humans and machines, deployable in the customer's own infrastructure.
Bitemporal ledger
#A ledger that keeps at least two time axes per record. Ledgerbook keeps exactly three: effective time (when the event happened), insertion time (when the ledger recorded it) and knowledge time (what was believed, and when) — recorded and believed are different axes. Ledgerbook adds insertion time as a third axis, answers both “balance as of March 31” and “what we believed on March 31” as first-class queries, and stamps every response with its resolved time points plus restated and stale flags.
Provisional entry
#A journal entry that is still being drafted, revised and approved — not yet part of the final books. Ledgerbook keeps one object per entry for its whole life and appends every material edit as an immutable revision carrying actor, timestamp and content hash; nothing is overwritten. Finalization is one-way: after it, changes happen only as typed corrections.
Finalization
#The one-way status transition that seals an entry's postings as immutable. It applies to the same entry object — no second object is created and the entry id never changes — and it is irreversible: after finalization the only admissible changes are typed corrections linked to the original.
Revision
#A change made while an entry is still Provisional, appended as an event on the same entry object with actor, timestamp and content hash. Revisions never overwrite: the entry keeps one identity for its whole life. “Revision” is provisional-only vocabulary — it is never the name of an accounting correction.
Correction
#A typed post-final entry that fixes an earlier one without editing it: reversal (mirror of a full posting set), adjustment (partial or IAS 10 adjusting events) or restatement (IAS 8 error corrections). A correction is linked to the original, so both the mistake and its fix stay visible and attributable.
Reversal
#A correction type that mirrors a full posting set — one correcting entry for one corrected entry — via the typed path POST /v1/entries/{id}/reverse. Reversals are posted entries, never in-place edits and never deletions.
Scenario
#A first-class axis on every posting naming which version of the future or past a record belongs to. The engine knows four kinds — actual, planned, simulated and custom — and Plan, Budget and Forecast are presets of planned, never kinds of their own. A scenario is stored either as a full independent set of postings or as adjustment-only deltas over a base. The scenario tag is mandatory on every posting, and each tenant has exactly one undeletable Actual scenario. Delta storage over the Actual base and cross-scenario operations such as promote are on the roadmap.
Plan vs actual
#Running plan and actuals on one ledger means both post to the same double-entry core, separated by the scenario tag — no copies, no drift. Planning modules read and write that ledger directly at PH-1; delta-scenario storage, where a plan inherits the actual base instead of holding its own rows, is on the roadmap. Ledgerbook ships the scenario registry, the mandatory tag and per-scenario balance checks today; composed scenarios, delta inheritance, promote and variance runs arrive with PH-2 ( Roadmap).
Committed
#The part of a period already determined by an obligation that exists — contracted revenue, prepaid amortisation, depreciation, lease expense — recorded as future-effective entries bound to that obligation and reported as the committed band of every forward read. A band of effective time, never a lifecycle status.
Book
#A valuation basis within a ledger — group IFRS, local GAAP, tax, management. A book is a model axis, not a separate ledger: multi-book writes are linked per-book entries that balance independently and never silently net. One entry belongs to exactly one book.
Dimension
#A customer-definable tagging axis on postings — cost centre, project, contract, anything the chart of accounts cannot express — plus the native Scenario and Status axes, which every posting carries. Dimension values are data, not schema, so a new dimension needs no migration; cardinality is bounded by a tenant-configurable budget. Dimensions are data, not schema: they map legacy account strings onto the ledger's model without migration of the source system.
Posting
#The atomic single-sided line of a journal entry — where monetary arithmetic is defined. Amounts are integer minor units in one ISO-4217 currency, balances per currency partition never net implicitly, and every entry's postings balance within one book.
Entry
#The unit of business meaning: a coherent journal entry — a balanced set of postings sharing an event, dates, one status and exactly one scenario and book. One object per entry for its whole life; there is no separate draft object, and identity is stable across revisions and finalization.
Provenance event
#An append-only OCEL2-conformant event recording a mutation — revision, finalization, correction, approval or ingest load — with who/when/where attributes: actor and credential, server timestamp, origin interface or application, approval state and materiality — and its chain position. It is the only write path: nothing in the system changes state without producing one.
Financial Event Web
#The typed lineage graph over one ledger together with the reconciliation assertion edges laid over it: billing records, terminal batches, channel statements and bank lines are nodes, and every node must tally against the postings it claims to explain. It is what an agent traverses when it asks why a number is what it is.
HQ currency
#The reporting currency of a consolidation scope, into which entity functional-currency balances are translated for group reads. Translation produces its own postings carrying the rate set used — it is never a display-time conversion.
Hash chain
#A structure that links each event to its predecessor cryptographically: every event carries the previous hash and its own hash over a canonical serialization, so altering any historical record breaks the chain at that point. Ledgerbook chain-hashes its event stream by default, publishes per-batch Merkle roots, and ships an independently runnable verifier that detects retroactive rewrites from the chain alone.
What is a hash-chained audit trail?
#A hash-chained audit trail links each Final entry — and every event, from the moment an entry is created — to the one before it, so altering any historical record breaks the chain and becomes detectable. Ledgerbook ships this on by default and lets you verify the chain online or offline, without ledger access — tamper-evidence you can check yourself rather than a policy you must trust.
OCEL 2.1
#Object-Centric Event Log, the open standard for recording events together with the business objects they touch — the format process-mining and audit tooling consumes directly. Ledgerbook emits OCEL 2.1 and accepts OCEL 2.0 or 2.1 inbound. OCEL 2.1 is the current revision and Ledgerbook's outbound audit-export format, schema-validated in CI; 2.0 is accepted inbound.
Idempotency key
#A caller-scoped key accepted on every write path so a retry cannot duplicate a posting. The same key with an identical payload returns the original result; the same key with a different payload is rejected as a conflict. Keys on money-bearing writes never expire.
Ledger
#The top-level, tenant-scoped set of books for one legal entity or consolidation scope — the isolation boundary for permissions and idempotency keys, and the unit of tenancy. An organisation can hold multiple ledgers; in Ledgerbook each ledger is a first-class boundary carrying its own books, scenarios and periods, and no query returns data across ledgers.
Status
#The lifecycle axis of an entry: Provisional (multi-revision) → Final (verified, one-way). Provisional and Final are the only public status values; internal states refine the provisional phase, and “pending”, “committed” and “posted” are never status values. Status is orthogonal to scenario and book — a Plan-scenario entry carries a Status exactly as an Actual-scenario entry does.
Period
#A calendar construct with open, soft-closed, closed and reopened states that governs which writes are legal — closing gates writes, it does not lock history. Every entry effective in a period can be asked “was this period closed when the entry reached Final?” as of knowledge time. Ledgerbook designs period states and close gates as ledger-native mechanics; they arrive with PH-2 ( Roadmap).
Account
#A node in the chart of accounts that postings reference, itself carrying dimension defaults. A posting to a mapped account inherits the account's default dimensions — cost centre, project, contract — unless it overrides them, and the chart of accounts is data rather than schema, so it evolves without migrations.
Balance (volume)
#A derived, as-of query result computed from postings — never authoritative mutable state. Ledgerbook computes balances per scenario, book and currency; any materialized form is rebuildable from the log, and no surface may expose a number that cannot be explained by its postings and events.
Tenant
#The outermost isolation and security boundary. Every credential, ledger, book, scenario and as-of read lives under exactly one tenant, and tenant scoping is enforced on every surface — including exports — so nothing reads across tenants by accident.
Missing a term?
The corpus grows to 30–60 terms. Define the terms your answers need — we take correction requests.