Accounting 101: What is General Ledger Accounting?

Transaction data is segregated, by type, into accounts for assets, liabilities, owners’ equity, revenues, and expenses. The general ledger account is therefore used to sort, store and summarize a company’s transactions. These general ledger accounts are arranged in the general ledger with the balance sheet accounts appearing first followed by the income statement accounts. The accounts of the general ledger may be further subdivided into sub-ledgers such as cash, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. The extraction of the balance of these accounts is what is used to create a trial balance.

The latter is less common and suited to smaller, simpler businesses without many monthly transactions. The general ledger (also called a general journal or GL) summarizes all the financial information you have about your business. If you use accounting software, the software itself should guide you through the process of reconciliation.

How to Create a General Ledger

General ledgers are made up of (and organized by) accounts, or subsections that categorize financial transactions by type. The accounts in turn may include sub-accounts or sub-ledgers, which record more precise details about each transaction. Instead of recording manual journal entries and building a general ledger by hand, automate your financial recording processes with accounting software. Free software options like Wave Accounting make general ledger creation as easy and simple as possible. This feature automatically matches the transactions recorded in your books of accounts with the bank statement balances.

• The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done.
• A general ledger is a master accounting record used by businesses to document and categorize their financial transactions.
• That is, these accounts must have a NIL balance at the beginning of the accounting period.
• Depending on the software and plan, you can also add custom accounts unique to your specific business.
• Revenue accounts in the general ledger are typically divided into categories, such as sales and interest.

QuickBooks offers other excellent reporting options as well, with more than 100 standard reports included in QuickBooks Pro, while Premier and Enterprise plans include more than 150 reports. Report templates are also included in QuickBooks Desktop applications, and you can easily customize a general ledger report to include only the accounts you wish to view. This template gives you everything you need to set up a simple, single-entry accounting system for your business.

The general ledger details all financial transactions of all accounts so as to accurately account for and forecast the company’s financial health. Think of the general ledger as the main database of a company’s financial records and information, with other financial documents being derived from the information recorded in the general ledger. Adjusting Entries are the entries prepared at the end of the accounting period to consider income or expenses that you have not yet recorded in the General Ledger. In this step, you need to compare the previous accounting periods closing trial balances to the opening balances of the current period ledger accounts. Thus, you need to check the balances for balance sheet accounts like assets, liabilities, and stockholder’s equity. Use this small business general ledger template to oversee transactions and track your small business’s overall fiscal health.

Use this template to ensure an accurate record of all line-item transactions for any journal entry or transaction type. Save this accounting general ledger template as a one-off file, or share it as a template with your accounting team to standardize financial reporting practices. Hence, the collection of all these accounts is known as the general ledger.

Company

An example would be a business owner who wants to see how much he paid for flour, for his bakery on January 7th. He could open the general ledger on March 9th, look back and see the debits and credits for the transaction. General ledger reconciliation is where you compare the balances of GL accounts with external sources, like bank statements, customer invoices, etc.

Of course, it’s still possible to do your bookkeeping with a paper ledger. But since bookkeeping by hand takes 1,000 times longer, most business owners and bookkeepers use accounting software to build their general ledgers. A general ledger template is a record of the income and expenses that affect your company’s bottom line. A general ledger template can help you record and monitor your financial data to ensure your debits and credits reflect your budget. Transactions that first appear in the journals are subsequently posted in general ledger accounts. Then, account balances are calculated and transferred from the general ledger to a trial balance before appearing on a company’s official financial statements.

A Balance Sheet Transaction Example

After all, you can’t manage your expenses if you don’t know what they are. Therefore, everyone within the company network can access the ledger at any point and make a personal copy of the ledger, making it a self-regulated system. This mitigates the risks that Centralized General Ledgers have from having one source control the ledger. The image below is a great illustration of how the blockchain distributed ledger works. So, you can easily find transactions you are searching for in your General Ledger if you have a code for every transaction.

Designed for the single-user office as well as growing businesses with multiple users, QuickBooks Desktop offers three plans to choose from. As a supplement to the general ledger, your chart of accounts lists the account names and purposes of all your sub-ledgers. When you hire a bookkeeper who understands your industry, they’re able to set up your books using sub-ledgers that make sense for you. Revenue is the business’ income that is derived from the sales of its products and/or services. Revenue can include sales, interest, royalties, or any other fees the business collects from other individuals or businesses. Liabilities are current or future financial debts the business has to pay.

Liability accounts

The accountant would then increase the asset column by $1,000 and subtract $1,000 from accounts receivable. The equation remains in balance, as the equivalent increase and decrease affect one side—the asset side—of the accounting equation. In this instance, one asset account (cash) is increased by $200, while another asset account (accounts receivable) is reduced by $200.

What is an accounting ledger?

Accounts Receivable is most commonly used as a General Ledger Control Account. In other words, you get a clear view of your business’s capacity to generate profits and the resources you have to meet outsider’s claims. Furthermore, you can refer back to the details with regards to the sales made in case you need to do so in the future. Likewise, Sales Ledger also helps you to keep track of payments received and yet to be received from your customers.

How to Use the General Ledger

Furthermore, businesses that employ the double-entry bookkeeping method make use of a general ledger. Hence, each financial transaction affects at least two sub-ledger accounts, which means that each entry has at least one debit and one credit transaction. The double-entry transactions how to close a business known as journal entries are posted in two columns, whereby the debit entries are posted on the left and the credit entries are posted on the right. A general ledger is a record-keeping system that is used for a company’s financial data, with debit and credit account records.