Booking is a word you hear and encounter a lot when it comes to accounting. It means: making something happen in your accountings at a specific time.
Why is it called booking?
Because it's a very old term; back in the day, every administration consisted of a thick stack of books. Imagine for a moment 1850 or 1950. Back then, if you went to write something down in those books, you'd say to your colleague, for example, "That jar of peanut butter that customer just bought I'm going to book it right now." Although the whole stack of books from accounting was often in an office somewhere, there was often a slightly thinner book on the counter of the store. The so-called sales journal. In it you would write down that you had one less jar of peanut butter and some more money. Bookkeeping and inventory at the same time.
At the end of the day, you took the sales journal back to the office and transcribed all the day's sales into another thicker book: the so-called ledger. These were actually big, because a lot had to be able to be written down in them. You can think of that ledger as Daxto's results report now, but back then it was all a bit more cumbersome and a lot of work by hand.
Anyway, times change. These days, we scan the bar code on the jar of peanut butter and the computer does the rest. But the word has stuck. The word "booking" is plain as day, even today.
Book date
The book date is the date and time you want to record a change in your accounts. So the book date does not have to be today's date. Example: suppose a supplier sent you a purchase invoice. That purchase invoice has an invoice date on it; your supplier put it on it. Let's say it's yesterday's date. So as soon as you start recording this invoice in your accounts, you're going to book it. You book it on the invoice date, that's how it's supposed to be. So that' s yesterday's date in this example. It doesn't matter that you write it down today, you still use the date of the purchase invoice as the book date.
Financial lock date
In turn, the financial lock date is modern. It's an option by which you protect your accounts from changes. You want that because figures that have been officially transmitted, such as to the Belastingdienst, may not change thereafter. A financial lock date can help with that. Your Daxto assistant will warn you if you try to book something in a period that you had closed using the financial lock date.