A single sales or purchase invoice fully paid up (e.g. where you import a bank entry, tag it as payment to/from a supplier/customer, and create a new invoice) would by my reckoning generate four ledger entries if you’re not VAT registered and 5 if you are, e.g. for a sales invoice:
- Creating the invoice
- Cr General Sales - the VAT-exclusive invoice total
- Cr Sales Tax Control - the total amount of VAT
- Dr Debtors Control - the total invoice amount including VAT
- Logging the payment
- Cr Debtors Control - the amount paid
- Dr Bank/Cash/PayPal/whatever - the bank account that received the payment
If the payment came via a merchant account like PayPal then there will be another two ledger entries when you actually receive the money (Cr PayPal merchant account/Dr Bank), so you can see that it quickly adds up. A combined total of four sales and purchases per week for a VAT registered business or five for a non-VAT business is enough to push you into the “large” bracket.