One job, every document: transactions in KRONENWERK

A workshop making 500 units of a component has a request, a take-off, a quote, the customer's purchase order, drawings, a supplier's confirmation, shop photographs, an inspection sheet, freight papers, an invoice and two payments. In most accounting products those eleven things live in eight places, and "how is the Meyer order doing?" costs half an hour of searching across e-mail, a shared drive and the books. A KRONENWERK transaction is the folder around all of it: one number, the customer, the stage, the deadline, every record and every file, a timeline of who did what — inside the accounting, not beside it. And it carries no money of its own, which is the reason the books stay right.

What a transaction is

A transaction — the navigation calls it a job — is one piece of business: a customer order, a manufacturing run, a project, a service engagement, a one-off delivery. It has a number of its own (V2026-0142, drawn from the company's counter, never consuming a quote or invoice number), a title, a customer, a stage, a period, a deadline and, from the Business plan, a responsible person. Under it hang two kinds of things:

Records

Quotes, invoices, supplier bills, receipts and expenses, incoming documents and payments that the books already hold. Linking one to the job is a pointer: the invoice stays posted as it was, open as it was, credited as it was. The job shows the number, the party and the state of each, resolved live from the record.

Files

Anything that is not a record: the customer's purchase order, drawings, a supplier's quote, photographs from the floor, the inspection sheet, the waybill, an e-mail saved as PDF. Any number of them, any size within the attachment limit, renamed for display while the original filename stays beside it as provenance.

Plus notes — short sentences on the timeline — and the history: created, customer assigned, stage changed, deadline moved, file added, record linked, note written, reopened, archived; each with who and when.

Why it lives inside the accounting

The common arrangement is a project tool for the work and an accounting tool for the money, with the documents split between them and the e-mail inbox holding the rest. It fails at exactly the moments that matter: the supplier's invoice arrives and nobody remembers which job it belongs to; the customer disputes an invoice and the purchase order that would settle it is in someone's mailbox; the accountant asks in March what the freight charge on a September job was for. Putting the folder inside the accounting means the supplier's bill is recorded on the job the day it arrives, with its PDF; the invoice is issued from the job with the customer's PO number as reference; and the question in March is answered by opening one page.

It also means an AI assistant can do the filing. "Record this bill against V2026-0142", "keep this waybill with the Meyer job", "draft the invoice for job V2026-0142" — every one of those is a single instruction because the job number names the folder. See what an assistant can do.

The boundary that keeps the books honest

A transaction carries no amount. There is no total on the job, no column for it, no screen that adds up the linked invoices into a "job value". That is deliberate and it is enforced: the service that manages jobs cannot reach the posting, payment or issuance services at all, and a test builds a complete financial state — books open, invoice issued, partial payment posted — runs every operation a job allows, including marking it completed, and re-measures receivables, the invoice's outstanding amount and the number of journal entries. None of them moves.

The failure this prevents is well worn in other products. First the job points at the invoice (right). Then it caches the amount so the list need not look it up (convenient). Then "completed" marks the invoice paid, because a finished job will be paid (helpful). And then a total on a job disagrees with the balance sheet and nobody knows which one is true. In KRONENWERK the books are the only truth about money, and the job is the only truth about the work; each points at the other and neither restates it.

Stages that follow the shop floor

New, quoting, approved, procurement, production, quality control, ready, shipped, completed — and cancelled. No order is enforced: a batch that fails inspection goes back to production, an order cancelled on delivery day goes from shipped to cancelled. Software that forbids the way back gets worked around by opening a second job, and then both histories are wrong. From the Business plan a company defines its own stages and assigns a responsible person, and the work board shows every open job by stage and owner.

A job from first e-mail to last payment

1. A request arrives. A job is created — by hand, by an assistant, or by your own system through the API — with the customer and the stage quoting. The request is attached as a file.
2. A quote is drafted from the job. It carries the job number; when sent, it is linked and its state (sent, accepted, expired) shows on the job.
3. The customer sends a purchase order. It is attached, the stage moves to approved, the deadline is set from the PO.
4. Supplier quotes are attached; the chosen supplier's confirmation too. Stage: procurement, then production.
5. The supplier's bill arrives. It is recorded on the job with the figures as printed and the PDF attached, awaiting a person's confirmation. The books now know what this job costs, and the job knows which bill it was.
6. Photographs and the inspection sheet from the floor are attached. Stage: quality control, then ready.
7. The invoice is drafted from the job with the customer's PO as reference, issued, and linked. Freight papers are attached. Stage: shipped.
8. Payments arrive; each is recorded against the invoice and shows on the job. Stage: completed. The job is archived; everything stays reachable by its number.

Finding things later

Jobs are searched by number, title or customer, filtered by stage and by period — the day it was ordered and the day it shipped — and the archive keeps completed jobs out of the daily list without hiding them. On the phone, the same jobs with the same files: KRONENWERK's iPhone app reads the same rows the web does. Through the API and the MCP server, the same again, so a job created by your own order system or by an assistant is the job a person opens in the browser.

How KRONENWERK handles this

SUPPORTED Transactions are in every plan: numbering, customer, stages, period, deadline, records linked by pointer, files without a per-job count limit, notes and the full history, on the web, on iPhone, through the API and the MCP server. Responsible persons, the company's own stages and the work board are part of the Business plan and above. A transaction never carries an amount and never changes a record it points at. See pricing and the accounting API.