Pennylane

Pennylane

Pennylane is accounting and invoicing software for French SMBs.

Operational order

1. Company profile once per session — confirms legal entity, currency, and fiscal settings before party or invoice work.
2. Customers and suppliers when you need party ids for invoice filters.
3. Products and categories when building or checking invoice line references.
4. Customer invoices / supplier invoices for AR/AP — always paginate; large firms span many cursor pages.
5. Ledger accounts, journals, and ledger entries for GL structure and postings.
6. Quotes for open sales quotes before they convert to invoices.
7. Bank accounts and transactions before payment matching actions.
8. Changelogs for incremental sync — set resource to the entity family; use start_date on first page, then cursor only.

Reads

Omit id to list with cursor pagination; pass id to fetch one row.

Bulk GL extracts

For full-period books, use the export action — not unbounded ledger line pagination. Start with export_type (fec, general_ledger, or analytical_general_ledger), period_start, and period_end; poll with the returned id until status is ready; set download=true on the poll call to fetch via a spillover link (file links expire in ~30 minutes). Analytical exports accept mode in_line or in_column.

Analytical categories

One categorize write covers customers, suppliers, both invoice types, and bank transactions — pass resource plus a JSON array of {id, weight} (weights in the same group must sum to 1).

Pagination

• Use cursor (opaque token from next_cursor) and limit (default 25, max 100 on most lists; changelogs allow up to 1000).
• Re-send filter and sort on every page when the list is filtered or sorted.
• Changelog feeds: use start_date OR cursor, never both. Retention is ~4 weeks.
• Do not request huge pages on invoice lists — filter by customer_id, supplier_id, or date when possible.

Trial balance

Requires period_start and period_end (YYYY-MM-DD) plus optional cursor pagination.

Invoice lifecycle

• From quote — convert an accepted quote into a customer invoice.
• Import — upload the PDF or e-invoice file first (returns file_attachment_id), then import customer or supplier invoice with that id.
• Finalize — draft customer invoices only.
• Email delivery — finalized or imported customer invoices and quotes; if the PDF is still generating, wait a few minutes and try again.
• Match payment — link bank transactions to finalized customer or supplier invoices.
• Validate AP — mark supplier invoice accounting complete.
• Quote status — pending, accepted, denied, invoiced, or expired (separate from line edits).

Filtering

Optional filter is a JSON array: [{"field":"…","operator":"eq","value":"…"}]. Common operators: eq, not_eq, lt, lteq, gt, gteq, in, not_in (field support varies by resource).

Writes

• Upsert pattern — omit id to create; pass id to update. Use body_json when typed fields are not enough.
• Customers — set customer_type to company or individual.
• Supplier invoices — updates require an existing id; importing a file uses the dedicated import action with body_json when needed.
• Delete customer invoice — draft invoices only.
• Monetary amounts are decimal strings, not floats.
• File upload — inline base64 is capped at 1 MB; use file_url for larger PDFs (up to 100MB). Local-only files over 1 MB need MCPBundles Desktop to stage bytes first. A presigned download link from a prior large read can be passed as file_url.
• Nested reads — pass parent_id for invoice lines, payments, matches, customer categories/contacts, commercial document lines, etc.

Large read payloads

List and detail responses return JSON inline when small. Oversize payloads return a presigned download link — open it for full JSON, or pass that URL as file_url on upload/import steps.

Data model

• Customers, Suppliers — parties.
• Customer invoices, Quotes, Supplier invoices — billing documents.
• Products, Categories, Category groups, Ledger accounts — catalog and chart structure.