Personal: Journal & Expenses

Source-CRM equivalent: Personal / Journal and Income & Expenses. Read-only in this release.

In this chapter - Journal - Expenses - Not yet available

Icon bar ▸ Personal. Two tabs; the window title shows "N Journal Entries Displayed" / "N Expenses Displayed".

Journal

As of the September 2026 confirmation below, the Journal list is intentionally empty in this release. Verified directly against a live database: the source CRM's own note-type code that this tab used to read (Type 7) is not a journal entry — it is an auto-logged sent email, matching the source CRM's own published type list (7 = Email) and the source CRM's own "Journalling" setting, which literally auto-logs sent email as these notes. Nothing in the connected database carries a distinct journal marker. Rather than keep presenting your emails under the heading "Journal" (a wrong answer, not an empty one), the tab shows "This database has no journal entries to show" and explains why. The Filter, Column Setup and Search controls remain in place — ready for the day a real journal source is wired up — but there is nothing for them to act on yet.

Toolbar controls (September 2026 update, unchanged by the above): filter List All / Today / Yesterday / This Week / This Month; Column Setup chooses which of Date / Time / Type / Text are shown and in what order (tick, Move up / Move down, OK), remembered for this list; Search hides every entry whose Text, Type or Date (or any of them) does not contain what you typed. Show all in the Search window, a change of filter, or Refresh brings the whole list back — all inert while the list itself is empty.

Expenses

Choose Year and Month (◄ ► step months); columns Account (code – description), the selected month's total, and YTD. Amounts come from the source CRM's expense accounts. An expense row is a per-account total, not a document, so it has no detail view to open — the right-click menu offers Select only. Column Setup on this tab works the same way as the Journal's (Account / month / YTD, shown or hidden, in your order, remembered).

When the database can't be read

An empty Journal or Expenses list can mean two very different things, and from the September 2026 update the module tells you which. If your database simply doesn't carry the Personal tables — some editions of the source CRM don't — the list is quietly empty, because that is the true answer. If the tables could not be read (the connection dropped, or your sign-in isn't allowed to read the database catalogue), you get "Failed to load journal entries from the database" / "Failed to load expenses from the database" with the reason, instead of an empty list that reads as "you have nothing recorded". Signing in without a SQL database at all (a MongoDB-only session) stays quiet too — that is not connected, not broken. One dropped connection no longer switches Personal off for the rest of your session: the next Refresh tries again.

Recording an expense

Home ▸ Create ▸ Expense (on the Personal ribbon) opens a small form: pick the account, the date, and the amount, then Save.

Expenses are kept as a monthly sheet per account, not as individual receipts — that is how the source CRM stores them. Saving adds your amount to that account's total for that day and to its month total, creating the month's row if it does not exist yet. The Expenses tab shows the new total straight away. A negative amount is allowed (a refund); zero is refused.

The account list comes from your database's expense accounts, so if it is empty the form says so rather than opening with nothing to choose. Recording an expense needs permission to change records.

Two limits worth knowing:

• The entry is booked against you — there is no "record this for someone else".
• The source CRM's Category and Type code columns are left empty. Their code tables are not documented, and filling them with a guess would mis-file the row; the totals the Expenses tab and the source CRM show are unaffected.

Not yet available

Editing or deleting an expense once recorded (and editing/deleting journal entries), expense-account maintenance, per-user filtering (all users' entries are listed), an expense detail view, printing. (Column Setup and Search on this panel were added in the September 2026 update; recording an expense in the September 2026 update.)

The ribbon's Home ▸ Create ▸ Journal Note button is present but explains itself instead of opening a form, and the reason is a data question, now confirmed against a live database rather than suspected: the notes whose type code is 7 — the only code the Journal tab could have read — are the source CRM's own Email log, not journal entries (see "Journal", above). Writing a "journal note" as Type 7 would file it as an email, so nothing is written. (Before the September 2026 update the button opened an ordinary note dialog whose saved note never reached the Journal; a note written that way is filed against a client entry, not into Personal.) Use Home ▸ Note, or an entry's Interactions tab, when you want to record a note against a client. Whether TechieCRM should show "no journal here", relabel this tab as an email history, or gain its own journal store is a product decision, not a data question — it is not decided by this update.

On the web portal

The web portal (My Work Day) adds what the desktop panel does not have: you can create, edit and delete both journal entries and expenses there.

A journal entry on the web records Subject, Date and the entry text — that is the whole record; a mood and tags are not part of a journal entry on the web either, for the same reason as the expense boxes below: earlier builds asked for them and then discarded them on save, so they have been removed rather than left collecting answers nothing keeps.

Who can see a journal entry

Your Journal is private to you. Another member of your workspace cannot open, edit or delete your journal entries: they are not listed in Notes, they never appear on a client's Interactions timeline, and a direct link to one answers not found rather than saying it exists.

Two people can be given sight of your Journal, and in both cases it is read only — nobody but you can ever add to, change or delete your entries:

• your workspace administrator, because the business owns the records its staff create; and
• any colleague your administrator has specifically given access to your Journal (Journal ▸ Journal access, administrator only). Access is granted one person to one Journal at a time, in one direction: giving Cal sight of Ann's Journal does not give Ann sight of Cal's.

When somebody has more than their own Journal to look at, the My Journal heading gains a Whose journal dropdown listing the Journals they may read. Everyone else sees no dropdown, because there would be nothing else in it.

Reading somebody else's Journal never looks like reading your own:

• the page says "You are viewing name's private Journal — read only";
• there is no Edit and no Delete button, and no New Entry button either — a new entry would be the reader's own, not the Journal owner's;
• following an edit or delete link by hand answers not found.

To give or remove access, an administrator opens Journal ▸ Journal access, picks the user and the Journal, and presses Grant; Revoke takes it away again. Both actions are recorded in the audit log. Only an administrator of your own workspace can do this — TechieCRM's own support staff cannot, even while helping you with your workspace open in front of them.

Expenses are yours alone in this release — there is no administrator view of another user's expenses.

An expense on the web records Description, Amount, Category and Date — that is the whole record. It is stored as a monthly expense-sheet row, the same shape the desktop reads, so an expense entered on the web appears in the desktop's Expenses panel under the same account and month. Currency, vendor, receipt reference, a reimbursed flag and a client link are not part of an expense in this release; earlier builds of the web form asked for them and then discarded them on save, so those boxes have been removed rather than left collecting answers nothing keeps.

The category pills above the expense list filter it, and the count beside the page heading is the number of expenses being shown. The summary card is deliberately NOT filtered: it is your overall total and your three largest categories, labelled as such, so it does not change under you when you pick a pill. An expense imported from the source CRM whose category is not one of the six named ones is shown as "Category n" and keeps that value when you edit the record.