# Businesses

URL: https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/business/

> How to run your business in Clatri, inside your personal entity or as a separate entity, with business lines, a catalog, sales, quotes and invoices.

Almost nobody starts a business by incorporating a company. They start by selling. And for months —sometimes years— that business lives inside someone's personal life: it gets paid into their usual account, pays with their usual card, and its accounting is a hunch.

Clatri is built for that business too, not only for the one that's already formally registered. But to do it right, you have to answer one question before any other.

## The question that decides everything: its own tax ID?

It's the onboarding question, and it isn't red tape: it's the only one that matters.

**Your business has a tax ID different from yours.** It's a legal entity: a real company, with its own bank accounts, its own obligations and its own books. In Clatri that's a **separate business entity**, with its own Balance sheet. You create it in **Settings → Entities**. On purpose, **no agent can create an entity**: that decision is yours and yours alone.

**Your business uses your same tax ID.** You're a side venture, a freelancer, an individual with commercial activity. Legally, your bank accounts are the same. Duplicating them in Clatri would be lying. So the business **is not a separate entity**: it's a **business inside your personal entity**. You can have several.

It's not a technicality. It's the difference between a system that reflects your legal reality and one that forces you to invent one.

## Business, project or entity

| If it's… | Use |
|---|---|
| A one-off activity that **ends** (a trip, an event, a client) | **Project** |
| A business or line that's **ongoing** inside the current entity, with no accounts of its own | **Business** |
| A new formal company, with its own tax ID, accounts and books | A business-type **Entity** |

## Business lines

A business entity can also have businesses inside it. It's the same mechanism, read differently: **business lines**, segments under the same tax ID. A company that runs a restaurant and a catering service isn't two companies: it's one, with two lines worth measuring separately.

A single rule governs them, and it's the one that keeps everything honest:

> **A business is an analytical dimension, not a separate set of books.**

That is: **it has no bank accounts of its own and no balances of its own**. The accounts belong to the **entity**. A business's result —its sales minus its expenses— is **derived** from the movements you tag to it. If you delete the business, its transactions aren't deleted or reclassified: they keep their historical tag.

And since a bank account belongs to the entity, to separate the money you don't split the account: **you split the movements**.

### Splitting what's shared

The rent both your businesses use. The software that serves both. The salary of someone who works for both.

On the transaction's **Accounting** screen, the **Business lines** section does the splitting: *"Split this transaction across your business lines. The entity total never changes."*

That last sentence is the guarantee. You split by percentage and the consolidated total doesn't move by a single cent — it only says how much each segment carries. Later, when you open the [Income statement](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/reports/) for one of them, the shared lines show you where they come from: *"\{percentage\}% of \{amount\} from the whole entity"*. You'll never confuse the part with the whole.

And if something was left unsplit, the report warns you: *"\{amount\} is not assigned to any business line."*

Watch out for one temptation: the fact that an income comes into the bank account you use for the business **doesn't mean** it belongs to that business. Clatri doesn't assume it. The assignment is always explicit.

## The workspace

Each business has its own screen, with three numbers at the top —**Sales**, **Net** and **To collect**— and four doors:

- **Products and services** — your catalog
- **Transactions** — this business's movements
- **Quotes** — your offers and invoices
- **Reports** — the three financial statements, filtered to this business

## The catalog

What you sell: **products** or **services**.

Each item carries its price and, if you want to know whether you're making money, its **cost**: a cost per unit, or a percentage of the price. With that, Clatri shows you the **margin** without you having to calculate it.

An item can have **more than one price**: the base price and any you name —wholesale, distributor, volume, with a suggested minimum quantity—. When you sell or quote, if the item has several, Clatri asks which one to use; the line keeps the chosen price and doesn't change even if you later edit the list.

**Inventory is optional**, and this matters. A service never carries inventory. A product may or may not: if you sell shirts and want to know how many are left, you turn it on; if you sell something that doesn't run out, you don't. An item without inventory is sold and invoiced just the same.

When you **do** turn it on, the sale does two things on its own: it deducts the units and records the **cost of sales** against inventory. That's why **you shouldn't also record an inventory adjustment** for that sale — it would deduct twice. Adjustments exist only for physical corrections: it got damaged, it got lost, you miscounted.

The catalog's **product category** is a commercial shelf. It organizes your list. **It decides nothing in accounting**: that's the job of the [Chart of accounts](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/chart-of-accounts/).

## Selling

Recording a sale is a four-step wizard —**Customer → Items → Payment → Review**— and the decision that really matters is in the third:

- **Paid now** — a cash sale. Clatri asks which account the money came into.
- **Collect later** — a sale on credit. The income **already counts** in your Income statement, and it stays as an **account receivable** in **[To collect and pay](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/accrual/)** until you get paid.

The customer is optional: a walk-in sale doesn't need a name.

If you're not sure whether you got paid, the right answer is **Collect later**. Clatri never invents a bank account to make a sale balance.

You can issue an **invoice** or record the sale without a document.

## Quotes and invoices

A **quote** is an offer. **It doesn't move anything**: no income, no cash, no books. It's a promise, and promises aren't accounting.

When the customer accepts, you **convert it to an invoice** and that's when the income is born, with both documents linked so you can trace the whole path.

Documents have statuses —draft, issued, sent, accepted, rejected, void—, generate a **PDF**, and can be shared, printed or copied as text.

### Your template

Not everyone issues "invoices". In Colombia an individual issues **cuentas de cobro** (bills of charge); elsewhere people talk about pro formas, sales notes or estimates. In **Settings → Entity → Invoice template** you decide what each document is called, its numbering prefix, the logo, the color, the issuer's details (name, ID, address, contact), the payment method you want printed, who signs, and a footer. Everything is optional: whatever you leave empty comes out as usual. Changing the prefix doesn't restart the numbering.

**Voiding has a limit, and it's on purpose.** You can only void a quote or an invoice that **hasn't received any payment**. An invoice that's already paid isn't voided: it's corrected with a credit note or a refund. Deleting the income and the real money to "cancel" it would be falsifying the past, and Clatri doesn't allow it.

## Discovering it

If you have a personal entity with no businesses, Clatri offers it to you with a card: *"Do you have a business? Sell, invoice and track inventory right here. No tax registration."*

Because that's the point: you don't need to incorporate a company to keep your books as if you were one.

## By chat

*"create a business called Bakery"*, *"record a sale of 12 loaves at 3,000 each, I was paid in cash"*, *"make Marta a quote for 40 hours of consulting"*, *"this month's rent goes 70% to the bakery and 30% to catering"*, *"how did the bakery do in May?"*