Ledgr/Documentation/Settings
Settings
Watch the 2 lessons: Set up your company details (2:40), Work in a second currency (1:55).
Thirteen tabs. Most of them you will fill in once in your first week and never open again — but two of them, Data and Sync, are worth knowing about before you need them.
Settings is on every plan, including Free. What you can change inside it depends on your role: everyone manages their own password and two-factor, while the eight tabs that configure the business need permission to edit roles — an owner or administrator. See roles & users.
Company
Your legal name, trading name, entity type, company registration number, VAT number, address and contact details. These are not decoration — they are printed on every invoice you issue, and several of them change what Ledgr does:
- The VAT number is how Ledgr knows you are a registered vendor. Without it you cannot prepare a VAT201 — the return is refused and says so — and a job card converted to an invoice bills its lines at nil VAT. Capture it the day you register, not the day you notice.
- The registration number is what the ITR14 and the annual return are prepared against.
- The banking details here become the default on documents, and can still be overridden per document.
The invoice wizard defaults a new line to the standard rate whether or not your company is registered. If you are trading below the compulsory-registration threshold and have not registered voluntarily, set the line rate to 0% — or set the rate on your products, which is where the invoice takes it from. VAT shown on a document by somebody who is not a registered vendor still has to be paid over to SARS.
Tax & VAT
Your VAT tax period category under section 27 of the VAT Act — the letter that decides whether you file every month, every two months, twice a year or annually, and which months those are. Ledgr's VAT201 periods and the deadline countdown on the dashboard both read it, so getting it wrong makes both wrong in the same direction.
The standard rate is currently 15%. You do not enter it and you cannot change it: it is date-effective in Ledgr, so a document raised before a rate change keeps the rate it was raised at — which is exactly what a VAT201 for a closed period depends on.
Localisation
Base currency, date format and number format. Ledgr defaults to South African conventions throughout, so most businesses never touch this tab — and what you choose here is used everywhere, including the invoices, statements and payslips your customers and staff receive, not only on your own screens.
Base currency
The currency your books are kept in — ZAR, USD, EUR, GBP, NAD or BWP. Every report, every control account and every consolidated figure is stated in it.
Once a single document has reached the general ledger Ledgr refuses the change and the picker says so, rather than letting you find out on Save. Re-denominating live books would need a rate, a date and a decision about who carries the difference, and a settings screen is not where any of those three gets made. If you have posted in the wrong currency, the answer is a new company rather than a conversion.
Foreign currency and exchange rates
Multi-currency is included from Business upwards. Below it you can hold a foreign currency on a record but not raise a new document in one; every document you already have stays readable, editable, settleable and convertible. See pricing.
Pick a currency on the invoice and Ledgr converts at the rate for that day, stores the rate on the document and posts the ZAR figures to the ledger. The document itself keeps the foreign amounts, because that is what the customer agreed to pay.
Rates come from the European Central Bank, with a second free source behind it if the first is unreachable, and Ledgr fetches them once for everyone — so the rate is the same number for every business on Ledgr, and there is nothing to configure and no key to obtain. They refresh roughly every six hours.
The card lists each pair separately, with where that rate came from and how old it is. That is deliberate: a US dollar rate typed this morning and a euro rate nobody has refreshed since March are different situations, and one "rates are fine" line is how the stale one ends up on an invoice.
- Refresh pulls the current rates. Most presses legitimately reuse a snapshot a few minutes old, and the card says when that is what happened rather than implying it reached the ECB.
- Type a rate when your bank used a different one, or when the feed is down. A typed rate is marked as yours and is not overwritten by the next refresh.
- Seeing the rates needs the banking view permission, changing them the banking edit permission — the same permission as the rest of "which money went where".
Rates move after you have raised a document, so the balance owed to you in rands moves with them. Reports → FX revaluation restates open foreign balances at a date you choose and posts the difference as a gain or a loss, leaving the document alone. Run it at each period end; it is what stops a foreign debtor being carried at a rate from three months ago.
Branding
Your logo, an accent colour and the footer text that appears on documents. There is a second logo slot for a professional body or trade association — SAICA, SAIPA, SAIBA, IRBA or your B-BBEE certificate — which sits alongside your own on invoices and statements.
The accent colour is picked from a wheel rather than typed as a hex code. Every colour on it has been checked for legibility against the surfaces it will be drawn on, so there is no way to choose one that leaves your own figures hard to read.
Appearance — light, dark, or follow the device
Ledgr has a full dark theme. System, Light or Dark sits on this tab, and two things about it are deliberate:
- It is per device, not per business. Your phone can be dark and the office desktop light. It is also remembered outside your session, so the login screen is already in the right theme and signing out does not flip the app back to light.
- Documents never follow it. An invoice preview is a picture of what your customer receives, so it stays white with dark ink in either theme — and so do other organisations' marks, like the WhatsApp logo or a professional body's badge.
Most of Settings is owner and administrator only, but Appearance is a preference belonging to the person holding the device, so the Branding tab is visible to every role. The business-wide parts of it — the logo, the accent colour, the footer — are still gated.
There is one invoice layout, shared by the on-screen preview, the PDF download, the emailed attachment and the customer's portal page — so what you see really is what they get. What you can change is the accent colour, the logos, the labels and which fields appear; see invoice settings for that. You cannot rearrange the page.
Payments
How your customers pay you by card. Two gateways, and you can connect either or both: PayFast and Yoco. Whichever you use, the credentials are yours — the money goes straight into your own merchant account, never through Ledgr's.
- PayFast — your merchant ID and merchant key. Enough on its own: a payment link works as soon as it is saved.
- Yoco — your secret key, and then a webhook. Yoco only reveals the webhook's signing secret once you have registered the webhook, and registering it needs the URL Ledgr shows you on this tab, so saving the key first and the signing secret afterwards is the normal order rather than a mistake.
The checkout works, your customer pays — and Yoco has no way to tell Ledgr, so the invoice stays open and a reminder chases somebody who has already paid you. Ledgr calls that account half-connected rather than connected, and refuses to create a payment link until the signing secret is in. Finish both steps in one sitting.
Your test and live mode comes off the Yoco key itself — sk_test_ or
sk_live_ — so there is no test-mode checkbox to disagree with it. On a group
whose entities bank separately you can hold a set per company. Keys are write-only: once
saved they are never shown again, only a masked hint. Changing any of this needs the banking
permission, because it decides which bank account receives money.
Which gateway may settle an invoice on its own, and how close a payment has to be before it does, is a separate decision and lives with the documents it affects — see invoice settings.
Ledgr's own subscription billing also runs on Yoco, but through Ledgr's account, not yours. The two are separate and neither can reach the other.
Integrations
What Ledgr is connected to, and whether each one will actually work. There are no credentials to type here: each row reports a fact about your account.
- WhatsApp Business — for sending invoices, statements, receipts, reminders and payslips over WhatsApp rather than email. Its switch is yours; the WhatsApp account behind it is Ledgr's, set up once for everyone, so there is nothing of your own to connect. If the service has no WhatsApp account configured, the row says it is unavailable and the switch is not offered.
- Yoco and PayFast — status rows, with no switch. They say whether a customer could pay an invoice by card right now; you connect them by entering your own merchant details on Payments above.
- Aura POS — also a status row. Aura posts each trading day's takings through Ledgr's API with a key, so the row says whether a live API key holds the scopes Aura needs, which key it is and when it was last used. It links to Roles & Users → API Keys to create one and to the Aura guide, which covers the account mapping.
Notifications
What Ledgr sends, on which channel, and to whom. It is organised as a card per channel with a master switch at the top of each — so "stop emailing my clients" is one switch rather than six, and there is a single answer to "is Ledgr messaging them at all?"
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Channel | Default | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| On | Overdue invoice reminders — which go to your customer, not to you — bills falling due, stock expiring, a technician assigned to a job, a workflow card assigned to you, and your own open-task digest | |
| Follows the integration | Overdue follow-ups to customers. Its master is the WhatsApp switch on the Integrations tab — one fact with one home — so turning it off here also stops WhatsApp being used to deliver invoices, and the card says so | |
| Push | Off | A payment landing against an invoice, a claim waiting for your approval, a document going out to a customer, and an invoice crossing its due date — delivered to your phone or tablet even when Ledgr is closed. The overdue one fires once, when the invoice turns, not every night it stays that way; the sent one goes to your colleagues rather than to whoever pressed Send |
Occasionally Ledgr emails you about something new it can do. That is deliberately not one of the switches above: turning off invoice reminders would otherwise silently stop you hearing about the product, with nothing on either screen connecting the two. Every one of those emails carries a one-click stop sending me product announcements link in its footer — no sign-in, no form — and using it stops nothing else. Invoices, quotes, statements, reminders, digests and anything about your own subscription are unaffected, because those are how your business runs rather than news about ours.
Push depends on several things outside your business's control, and every one of them fails as silence with the switch still reading On. So the card carries Send a test notification, which registers this device, says how many devices are registered, and names anything missing. Switching push on is what raises your phone's own permission prompt. On desktop and web there is nothing to register, and the card says so rather than offering a test that could never arrive.
Two things Ledgr will not do here. A reminder you have switched off is not recorded as having been sent, so the invoice does not end up marked as chased when nobody chased it. And a run that sent nothing because you asked it not to is reported differently from one that found nothing to send — silence and success should not look the same.
Security
Your own account's password and two-factor authentication, plus — for administrators — the policies that apply to everyone: session timeout, password rules, lockout thresholds and how long the audit log is kept, which is seven years by default (the Companies Act period) and never less than the five years the Tax Administration Act requires.
Every time somebody saves settings, the audit log records who, when, and each setting they changed with its value before and after — so “who switched off the overdue reminders” has an answer.
The policy can require two-factor of owners and admins — everyone who can manage users and roles, whatever their role is called and in whichever company they hold it — or of everyone. A person it applies to who has not set two-factor up is taken straight to setting it up at their next sign-in, and can use nothing else until they have.
Turning on two-factor gives you ten single-use recovery codes, shown once. Ledgr stores only a fingerprint of them, so no screen and no support request can ever show them to you again. Each one works in the same box as your six-digit code at sign-in. If you lose both your phone and the codes, an owner or administrator can reset two-factor for you — see roles & users.
Accountant access
Your side of working with an outside accountant or bookkeeper. It is shown to anyone who can read reports, not only to administrators, because one of its cards is the one both of you use.
- Requests to connect — a practice asking to see your books appears here, with Accept and Decline. Somebody who cannot answer is told who can.
- Queries — the questions that would otherwise go by email: your accountant raises one from inside your books, you answer it here, and it stays with the record it is about.
- Who can see my books — for an owner or administrator: every accountant with access, at what level, and the control to invite one or take access away. An invitation grants nothing until it is accepted.
The practice's own half — its client list, opening a client's books, the adjusting-journal queue — is the Practice screen, not this tab.
A franchisor reading your reports
If your business is a franchise, Your franchisor on this tab lets the franchise group read your income statement. Enter their email address; they accept the invitation from their own Ledgr business. From then on they can choose a period and see your income, costs and net profit, read from your books at the moment they ask.
It is read-only and narrow: they cannot open your books, change anything or see a single transaction, and nothing of yours is copied into their books. Each time they read it, your audit log records it. Remove access ends it at once.
On the franchisor's side, Your franchisees appears on the same tab once an invitation arrives: accept it, then pick a period and open a franchisee's income statement, one per company they keep books for.
Billing & Plan
Your plan, term, renewal date, employee band, storage usage and purchase history, plus the box for entering a licence key. It has a guide of its own.
Data
Four things live on this tab: getting your history in, getting a copy out whenever you want one, the automatic backups Ledgr keeps for you, and putting records back if something goes missing. The first two are below; the last two have sections of their own.
- Import — seven things, as CSV: your chart of accounts, an opening trial balance, contacts, products, invoices, sales leads and payroll year-to-date figures. The first two are what a real migration starts with. Preview first: the preview runs the same import and reports the same counts, so what it tells you is what will happen. See switching to Ledgr.
- Export — a ZIP of CSVs: contacts, invoices with their lines, bills, products, expenses, time entries, and the general ledger — your chart of accounts, every journal and every journal line. Available on every plan, at any time, with no notice period and nothing to ask for. Employees and payslips — ID numbers, bank accounts and salaries — are included only for someone whose role may see payroll, and only they can download a backup.
Exporting is worth doing once now rather than for the first time under pressure. The Tax Administration Act asks you to keep records for five years, and that obligation is yours whether or not you are still a Ledgr customer.
Automatic backups
Ledgr keeps its own copies of your books, off your device, on every plan including the free one. There is nothing to buy and nothing to switch on — the first one runs on its own. Backups do not count towards your storage allowance, so keeping them costs you nothing.
A backup is the same ZIP the Export button above produces, taken unattended. That matters more than it sounds: it is not a database snapshot only Ledgr can read, it is a self-contained set of CSVs you can open in a spreadsheet or hand to an accountant, plus a complete record of every row for the restore below. One mechanism, so the copy taken at 02:00 can never turn out to hold less than the one you took by hand.
The controls
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Back up my books automatically | On by default. Switched off, the card says so plainly — "only the export above protects your data" — because that is the state worth noticing. |
| Backup frequency | Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Daily is the default. A backup is a full copy rather than an incremental one, which is why there is no hourly option. |
| Keep backups for (months) | 12 to 240. Every backup is kept for 30 days; past that, one per month is kept until this limit is reached. |
| Back up now | Takes one immediately. Pressing it twice takes two — unlike the scheduled run, which takes one per period however many times it fires. |
The card's subtitle is the fastest way to tell whether this is working: Running — next backup 2026-09-08, or Switched off. Underneath it, Backup history lists the copies Ledgr is holding with a date, whether it was automatic or one you asked for, its size, and a Download link on each. A books-only ZIP is usually tens of kilobytes, so the sizes are small — that is normal, not a truncated backup.
Setting this to 12 months does not delete anything from your books. It only decides how far back the spare copies go. The Tax Administration Act asks you to keep accounting records for five years, and that obligation sits on the records themselves — which stay in Ledgr regardless of this figure.
Press Back up now, then Download the result and keep it somewhere that is not Ledgr. Automatic backups protect you against a mistake inside your books; a copy you hold yourself protects you against everything else. It takes about a minute.
Putting records back
Every successful backup in the history carries Restore from this backup. It exists for the case a backup is actually opened for: somebody deleted a month of invoices, or a batch of expenses went missing, and you want them back.
Ledgr puts back records your books no longer have. Nothing that is in your books now is changed or removed — including anything edited since the backup was taken. That is a narrower promise than "roll my company back to Tuesday", and deliberately so: rolling a company back means replacing today's books with older ones, and if that goes wrong there is nothing left to recover from. Adding back what is missing has no such risk — the worst outcome is a row you delete again.
- Settings → Data → Backup history, then Restore from this backup
Pick the backup dated before the records went missing.
- Read the preview
Nothing has been written yet. Ledgr compares every record in the backup against your books and tells you exactly what it would put back — 34 × invoices, 34 × invoice lines, 2 × contacts — how many are already there unchanged, and every record it will not restore, with the reason.
- Put these records back
The same comparison runs again and the additions are made. Restored invoices, bills and expenses are re-posted to the general ledger by the same code that posted them the first time, so your trial balance is correct afterwards rather than needing a rebuild. The dialog reports how many journal entries were re-posted.
What a restore will not put back, and why
| Reason | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Already in your books | Live and identical to the backup. | Nothing. This is the ordinary case for most of a backup. |
| Changed in your live books | The record is still there but something about it differs from the backup — it has been edited since. | Nothing automatic. That edit is somebody's work, so Ledgr refuses to revert it. Open both and decide. |
| Period closed | The document is dated inside an accounting period you have closed. | Re-inserting it would restate a VAT201 you have already filed. Reopen the period first if you genuinely want it back. |
| Parent missing | An invoice line whose invoice is neither in your books nor in this restore. | Restore the document first — a line belonging to no document is worse than a missing line. |
What can be restored: contacts, products, invoices and their lines, bills, expenses and time entries. Your chart of accounts and the journals themselves are deliberately not on that list — the chart is structural and Ledgr maintains it, and the journals are rebuilt from the documents rather than copied, so the ledger always comes from one source rather than from a copy of an older answer.
Backups taken before the restore feature existed hold the CSVs and not the full row detail a safe restore needs. Ledgr says so rather than putting back a partial invoice with no company, no terms and no links — a record that would look restored and be wrong in ways nobody would think to check. Those backups still download and still open in a spreadsheet.
Sync
Whether you are online, how many writes are queued, and whether anything failed. This card is also the honest list of what works offline — nineteen kinds of record across invoicing, expenses, contacts, inventory, the CRM, job cards, time tracking, payroll leave and workflows — and it says plainly what does not.
Offline & load shedding explains why the line falls where it does.
About
Your version, the region your data is hosted in (africa-south1, Johannesburg) and
links to the privacy and security position. If you are reporting a problem to
support, the version string here is the first thing to include.
Fifteen minutes, once
Company details, VAT category, logo, banking. Everything downstream reads them.
Common problems
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
| Most of the tabs are missing | Eight of them configure the whole business — Company, Localisation, Tax & VAT, Payments, Integrations, Notifications, Billing & Plan and Data — and they are shown only to an owner or administrator. Everyone still gets Branding (the brand colour and logo on it are for administrators; light and dark mode are everyone's), Security with their own password and 2FA, Sync, and About with the account they are signed in as. Accountant access is shown to anyone who can read reports, because its Queries card is the one both you and your accountant use. None of that is a licence limit; it is who may change how the business is set up. |
| The base currency will not change | Something has already been posted. Re-denominating a live set of books needs a rate, a date and a decision about who carries the difference, and a settings screen is not where any of those gets made — so Ledgr refuses rather than converting. The note beside the picker says which of the two reasons applies. To invoice in another currency you do not need to change this at all: pick the currency on the document. |
| A WhatsApp switch is not there, or the row reads Unavailable | WhatsApp is not available on Ledgr at the moment, so the row shows the reason instead of a switch that would change nothing. A switch you can toggle that does nothing is worse than no switch. |
| You turned a notification off and the emails continued | Check which of three things you meant. The per-channel master stops the channel; an individual switch stops one kind of message; and product announcements are not on that card at all and carry their own opt-out in every message. |
| Two-factor enrolment will not complete on a phone | Scan the code with a second device, or type the setup key shown under it — you cannot scan a code with the device displaying it. The Verify button sits above the keyboard; if you cannot see it, the field it belongs to is the one to scroll to. |
| Authenticator codes stopped being accepted for everyone | Ledgr cannot read the stored two-factor settings at the moment. The message says so specifically — codes cannot be checked right now, which is a different state from a wrong code. Sign in with a recovery code and contact support. |
| A code is refused seconds after it worked | A code cannot be used twice. Wait for the next one — this is a replay guard, not a fault. |
| The session timeout saved without pressing Save | Correct, and it is the only control on this screen that behaves that way: it saves a security policy rather than an ordinary setting. The card says so. |
| A field will not accept what you type | Several are pickers rather than free text — the financial year end, the legal form of the business — so Ledgr never has to guess at a value it cannot read. A numeric field keeps what you type until it is a valid number in range. |