The seven Books families

Books is the native accounting workspace behind /books. It reads the records that each business process actually owns, then attaches the related accounting event, complete journal entries, source clock, approval evidence, and Assurance findings without making a second ledger.

Family	What its registers cover
Settlement / rails / AP-AR	rails, evidence, obligations, settlements, allocations, advances, deposits, employee float, and rail matches
Inventory / costing	stock, production, receipts, costing, logistics allocations, inventory adjustments, assets, orders, items, and bill lines
Payroll	employees, contracts, attendance, payrolls, components, allocations, bills, obligations, variances, and accruals
Loans / treasury	facilities and movements
VAT / statutory tax	tax entries
Adjustment notes	debit and credit notes against existing obligations
Consolidation	intercompany invoices, FX revaluations, equity, and dividends

Select a family from the Books overview, then open a structure to see its bounded native register. Five approval-sensitive families also show exact durable maker-checker evidence rather than inferring approval from a status label.

Read state is separate from freshness

State	What GreatBook is saying
`complete`	Every required native read for this answer succeeded. Zero rows is reported separately as an empty complete result.
`partial`	Authoritative rows were read, but some related structure, accounting link, tie-out, or evidence was unavailable or defective. The rows stay visible.
`inconclusive`	The available evidence cannot decide the question, such as a missing or ambiguous clock or lineage fact.
`error`	The native read itself failed. No count or empty-book claim is derived from it.

Freshness is another contract over each family’s source clocks. fresh means the newest relevant clock is within the 35-day window, stale means it is older, inconclusive means the clock is unknown or the family has no authoritative as-of field, and error means freshness could not be evaluated. A stale family can still have a complete read, and a fresh timestamp cannot turn a partial read into a complete one. Several families legitimately render Inconclusive or Freshness unavailable when native source facts, journal lineage, book-currency history, or an authoritative as-of clock are absent. Those labels are the intended result of a bounded read, not a degraded substitute for green.

Coverage is the published subset

Family accounting-link coverage includes structures that actually publish accounting links. Master and reference structures remain authoritative family members, but their absence from the accounting-link subset is not a failed link. The UI reconciles every structure the endpoint published and separately verifies the complete family catalogue, so it neither demands a fabricated journal link from a master table nor lets an unknown structure disappear. A control-account tie-out may publish no control account only when that control discovers its accounts from its own rows and the same response establishes a zero-row population. A populated control with no named account is still unreadable.

What this surface refuses

Books is read-only. It does not edit native rows, post a journal, waive a finding, convert an unreadable response into zero, call an unknown clock stale, or hide rows because their journal lineage is missing.

When the answer is unknown

Unknown coverage remains partial or inconclusive, unknown freshness remains inconclusive, and a failed source remains error. The UI withholds totals that require a complete answer and shows the backend detail instead of painting an empty state.

Verified at source

backend/app/logics/finance/books.py defines the seven-family catalogue, register projection, four read states, 35-day freshness contract, approval-sensitive families, and read-only behavior.
backend/app/logics/finance/gl_lineage.py owns the shared event/source resolver used by Books and Transactions.
The GreatBook web repository’s src/lib/books-workspace.ts rejects malformed or internally inconsistent complete responses before the UI may show their counts and distinguishes the published accounting-link subset from the full family catalogue.
The release fixtures under tests/fixtures/real-api/books-family-*-summary.json record all seven family responses from the running demo backend at the pinned release head; they include complete, partial, inconclusive, fresh, and inconclusive-freshness states rather than one universal green result.

​The seven Books families

​Read state is separate from freshness

​Coverage is the published subset

​What this surface refuses

​When the answer is unknown

​Verified at source