Transaction
In accounting, transaction means a business event — a payment, a sale, a purchase.
- Layer
- Lexicon
- Defined in
- Lexicon
- Components
- 16
Not a rule
Bookkeeping convention — not codified. US GAAP governs recognition, measurement and presentation — not the mechanics a bookkeeper uses to get there. Anyone citing a standard for this word is citing the wrong thing.
Every citation in this system, with the text we read and the date we checked it, is in US GAAP and where these rules come from.
The lessons that teach this
Accounting, 0 to 1 — a free course taught end to end on one month of one company, with the spreadsheet exercises to work it yourself.
- 01Why the books existBookkeeping is not record-keeping for its own sake. It is a system built so that an error announces itself and every figure traces back to an event.7 min
- 05Recording the monthThirteen things happened to Northwind in September. Here is every one of them turned into an entry, with the reasoning that produced it.13 min
Transaction, in use
Quoted from the 13 documents that use the word — what it does to an interface, in the spec's own sentence.
QBO is a transaction engine with a query language.
Lopifi APIs: Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite — The mental model of each
BulkActionBar and CategoryPicker, with rule creation inline from a single transaction and a match-count preview.
Cutoff is the boundary problem: a transaction dated in one period, entered in another.
For founders
The same idea written for a founder: what it costs a startup that ignores it, and what to do in a real month.
- Bank reconciliation step by stepMatch the bank statement to the books, clear deposits in transit and outstanding checks, book the fees, and reach a $0.00 difference every month.
- General ledger and double-entry bookkeeping, explainedHow double entry works: journal entries, debits and credits, normal balances, running balances, the trial balance, and why posted entries are reversed.
- Why startups should close their books every monthA monthly close turns a bank balance into numbers an investor, an auditor or a 409A firm will accept. What it is, and why it gets expensive to skip.
What it is not called
Each of these is a real word for a different thing. Using it here is what makes a product read as though it was built by someone who has not done the work.
- activity
- item
Components that render this
The concept is not documentation-only. These are the components that name it in their specification, grouped and stated exactly as the catalog states them.
1Primitives
Family spec2Cards
Family spec- TransactionTableThe workhorse. Virtualized, sticky, priority-collapsing.
- TransactionCardThe mobile re-rank.
- TransactionDetailFull detail sheet with attachments and audit trail.
- TransactionRowDesktop row.Spec
- BulkActionBarSelection count + actions, safe-area aware.
- CategoryPickerHierarchical with rule creation.
- ColumnHeaderThe sortable, draggable header cell.
- ExportMenuCSV/XLSX/PDF with a stated scope.
- LedgerTableDouble-entry with debit/credit columns and a balance check.
- TableColumnsSort and resize for a table that renders on the server.
11Payables (AP)
Family specAlso in Core ledger
Defined in Lexicon. This page is generated from that document, so the two cannot disagree.