Distribution of journal entries by originating module (Order Entry, AP, AR, Inventory, Cash Management, manual JE, connector). A spike in manual JE share is a control-quality signal.
At a glance
A breakdown of where your journal entries come from: Order Entry, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory Control, Cash Management, manual journal entries, and the commerce connectors. In a well-run Sage Intacct ledger the overwhelming majority of postings flow automatically from the operational sub-ledgers, and manual JEs are a thin slice reserved for genuine adjustments. The shape of this distribution is a direct read on the health of your automation and your controls. A growing manual-JE slice means the automated machine is failing somewhere and people are patching the gap by hand, which is slower, more error-prone, and exactly what auditors scrutinise.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Sage data by grouping each journal entry by its originating module and computing the share of each. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US ecommerce group on Sage Intacct, single entity, annual revenue ~$35M across Shopify, Amazon, and a wholesale BigCommerce B2B portal. Highly automated order-to-GL posting. Snapshot taken 9 Jun 26 covering the trailing 30 days. The card renders a donut of journal counts by source module.
Five things to notice:
- 61% from Order Entry connector feeds is the healthy shape, because that is the operational volume posting itself automatically. In a high-volume ecommerce business the bulk of journals should be order-driven and machine-posted: every Shopify, Amazon, and BigCommerce order that flows to the GL is a journal nobody had to key. A distribution where Order Entry dominates and manual JE is a thin slice is exactly what you want to see. The card confirms the automation is carrying the load. If this slice suddenly shrank, the question would be whether the order feed had broken, which would also show up in Commerce Orders Without Sage Intacct Order.
- The manual-JE slice rising from 2% to 3.7% is the one movement worth chasing, even though it is still small in absolute terms. A near-doubling of the manual share in one period is a control-quality signal regardless of the low base. Something that used to post automatically is now being keyed by hand, or a new adjustment pattern has emerged. The card surfaces the shift; the next step is to cut the manual slice by preparer (via the Audit Trail) and by GL account to see what is being manually posted. On this account the increase traced to a new PSP whose fee transactions were not yet mapped, so finance was manually journaling the fees each day, which is exactly the kind of automation gap that should be fixed at the mapping layer, not papered over with daily manual entries.
- The connector slice is the bridge between the commerce world and the ledger, and its size tells you how commerce-driven your GL is. At 61%, this business runs almost entirely on automated commerce postings, which is normal for a pure ecommerce operation. A traditional distributor with phone and EDI orders would show a smaller connector slice and a larger AP/AR slice. Neither is wrong; the shape just describes the business. What matters is stability: a connector slice that lurches up or down period to period usually means a feed changed, a channel was added, or an integration started double-posting, all of which are worth a look.
- AP and AR slices behave like a vital sign for the back office. A sudden jump in the AP slice can mean a supplier-invoice catch-up after a backlog, or a new vendor onboarding wave; a jump in AR can mean a billing run or a credit-memo cleanup. These are usually benign and explainable, but reading them in context stops a finance lead from being surprised by a question in the close review. The trailing comparison is what separates a normal monthly rhythm from a genuine structural change in where journals originate.
- Pair with Manual JEs as % of Total for the alerting layer and Transaction Imbalances for the integrity layer. This card is the diagnostic distribution; the manual-JE card carries the threshold alert; the imbalances card catches the case where a feed is not just busy but broken. Read as a trio they answer three questions: where do journals come from, is the manual share creeping up, and is any feed posting unbalanced data. On this account the trio together showed the manual slice was rising for a benign reason (the unmapped PSP), no feed was imbalanced, and the fix was a mapping change rather than a control crackdown.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against Sage
Where to look in Sage Intacct: The native Sage Intacct views to run side by side with this card:
General Ledger → All → Journal Entries filtered to the period and grouped by source, which is the closest native equivalent to this card’s distribution
General Ledger → All → Open Batches and posted batches, each carrying its source-module stamp
Reports → General Ledger → GL Detail with a source-module column added, exported and pivoted to count by module
Audit Trail on the manual-JE slice to attribute hand-keyed journals to specific preparers
Interactive Custom Report (ICR) on the GL data source grouping the batch count by MODULEKEY (the source-module field) over the trailing window
Intacct stamps every batch with the module that created it, which is what makes this distribution clean and reliable. The card’s count matches a native Journal Entries listing grouped by source, as long as both use the same period boundary and the same definition of “journal” (batch-level vs line-level). For Multi-Entity Console accounts group by source at the same entity scope as the dashboard filter, because connector feeds and manual entries can concentrate in particular subsidiaries.
Common reconciliation pitfalls:
- Batch count vs line count: the card counts journal entries (batches) by default, not individual GL lines. A native report that counts lines will read much higher because one Order Entry batch can contain dozens of lines. Align on the unit before comparing.
- Connector feeds bucketed as import/API: Intacct groups connector postings under the import or API source rather than a named commerce module. The card relabels these as connector journals using the integration identity; a raw native report will show them as import/API.
- Recurring and reversing journals: these post under their original module but can inflate the manual slice if created as manual templates. The card classifies by the actual posting source, not the template type.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
The cross-connector value is that the journal mix is the fingerprint of how your operation actually posts to the ledger. When the Order Entry slice falls while the commerce connectors say orders are flowing normally, the feed is dropping postings and the orphaned-orders card will confirm it. When the manual slice rises while the Smart Coding queue is backing up, the cause is unrecognised transactions forcing hand-keying. Reading the distribution against its commerce-side and GL-health siblings turns a static donut into a live diagnosis of where the automation is winning and where it is quietly failing.