Accounting and export (FEC, CSV)

Garage+ does not keep your books: it prepares the journal entries of your sales, payments and cash register in the format your accountant imports. The Settings › Accounting screen has two tabs: Accounts (with the Manage settings permission) and Export (with the Export accounting permission). A person who holds only one of the two sees only the matching tab. During a support session, the Accounts tab stays available; only the export is refused there (garage data never leaves in a file during a support session).

The accounts

Accounts are prefilled with the values of the French general chart of accounts (PCG): you have nothing to set up to export. Change only what your accountant asks:

• Journals: VE (sales), BQ (bank, payments), CS (cash register), OD (miscellaneous). A journal code is 1 to 3 capital letters or digits.
• Revenue and third parties: labor, parts and flat-rate jobs (706000, 707000, 706000), deposits received and gift cards sold (419100), the collective customer account (411000). The customer account prefix (C by default) is followed by the customer code: C000042 for customer 42.
• Accounts by payment method: one account per kind of method (cash 530000, card and cheque 511200, transfer and other 512000, third-party payer 467000, gift card 419100).
• VAT collected, by rate: one account per VAT rate of the garage (Settings › Garage). Left empty, the account is the rate default: 4457 followed by the rate on four digits (20%: 44572000, 10%: 44571000, 5.5%: 44570550).
• Cash register: counterparts of cash in, cash out and bank deposits (580000), counting differences (shortage 658000, overage 758000).

An account code is 3 to 13 digits or capital letters. Save sends only the fields you changed. Reset to PCG values (after confirmation) puts every account back to its original value.

Changing an account breaks nothing: issued documents do not change (they are sealed); only the future entries of an export, and downloading a past export again (see below), use the new accounts.

Exporting entries

1. Choose the period: the previous month (the default), the current month, or exact dates (from… to…, two years at most).
2. Choose the contents: sales (invoices, credit notes, deposit invoices and their deductions, including over-the-counter sales); if the Payments and cash register feature is on (Settings › Features), also payments (payments, refunds, cancellations, gift cards) and the cash register (cash movements and counts). Without the cash register, only sales are offered. Payments are offered only to people who can read them (permission View payments, unpaid invoices and statements or View compliance), the cash register only to people who can read it (View the cash book or View compliance). Payment transfers to another document are not exported (a transfer moves no money). The “Paid” box of an invoice is never exported either: it is declarative, outside the cash register.
3. Choose the format: the FEC (fichier des écritures comptables, the French audit file, in the legal format of article A47 A-1 of the Livre des procédures fiscales: 18 columns, | separator, file name <SIREN>FEC<YYYYMMDD>.txt) is recommended; the CSV holds the same entries in a readable spreadsheet (; separator, French headers). The FEC requires the garage SIRET: as long as it is missing (Settings › Garage), only the CSV is offered.
4. Check the preview: number of documents, lines, total debit and credit. “Balanced ✓” confirms that debit equals credit. If a document is not balanced, the preview names it and the whole export is refused: contact support rather than working around it.
5. Click Download.

An export holds at most 200,000 entry lines: beyond that, the preview says so and the export is refused; choose a shorter period.

In a demo garage, the screen shows “Demo garage: export with no value”. Exporting stays possible, to try it in accounting software: the FEC content keeps the legal format, but the file name (FEC or CSV) starts with DEMONSTRATION-.

The export reads only issued and sealed documents (never a draft) and changes nothing: invoices and payments stay as they are (see Compliance).

Periods already exported

If the period overlaps an export already made, the preview says so (period, format, author, date). It is a warning, never a refusal: you can export again, for example to send a corrected period. Garage+ keeps a record of every export.

History and downloading again

Under the export, the history lists every export: period, format, contents, author, date and fingerprint (SHA-256 of the file, shortened). Garage+ does not store the file: Download again recomputes it identically from the sealed documents. If the recomputed file differs from the original, the screen says so: “The file changed since the export: settings modified or new documents.” This happens when an account (of a payment method or of the accounting settings) changed since, or when new documents entered the period (export of a period that was still running). A changed SIRET only changes the file name, not its content. The recorded export itself never changes.

The accountant

The Accountant role comes with every garage: it can export the accounting and view payments, the cash book, compliance and clients, with no write access at all. Invite your accountant as a member with this role (see Members and invitations and Roles and permissions): they download their own files, and Garage+ sends nothing to a hand-typed address. They see the Export tab, not the Accounts tab.