The general ledger is every accounting entry your organisation has made. Journal entries are how things get into it.
Double-entry, briefly
Every entry has two sides and they are equal. Money leaving one account arrives in another; nothing appears from nowhere.
That constraint is what makes the books checkable. If the two sides of everything match, the trial balance balances, and if it does not, something is wrong in a way you can find rather than a way you have to guess at.
You do not need to be an accountant to use Finance. You do need this one idea to read the general ledger without being confused by it.
Almost everything posts itself
The important thing about this surface: it is not where transactions are entered.
An invoice sent posts. A payment received posts. An expense approved posts, and paying it posts again. A payroll run released posts. None of those require anybody to open the journal.
Which accounts each one hits is decided by the mapping layer, which has its own article and is editable.
So the general ledger is a place to inspect, correct exceptions, and close the month. If you find yourself making entries by hand routinely, something upstream is not mapped and the fix is there rather than here.
Debits and credits, without the theory
The two sides have names and the names confuse people, so the short version.
A debit increases an asset or an expense, and decreases a liability, equity or revenue.
A credit does the opposite.
That is the whole rule. The normal balance on each account tells you which side it usually sits on, so an account sitting on the wrong side is a signal worth a look rather than something to be corrected by reflex.
You will rarely need this. The entries are made for you and the statements read in plain terms; it is here so the ledger is not opaque when you do open it.
When you do make one by hand
The legitimate cases are narrow and worth knowing.
Opening balances, when you start using the system with an existing business.
Accruals and prepayments, recognising something in the period it belongs to rather than the period it was paid in.
Depreciation, and other periodic adjustments.
Corrections, where something posted to the wrong account.
Anything outside that list is usually a symptom rather than a task.
Voiding
A voided entry is cancelled but not removed. It stays visible, marked, with whatever explanation was given.
That is deliberate. An entry that disappears leaves a gap somebody will eventually ask about, and the answer "it was voided" is only useful if the record of it exists.
Three states
Draft. Written and not in the books. It affects nothing and can be edited freely.
Posted. In the books. It appears in the trial balance and on the statements.
Voided. Cancelled.
A posted entry is not edited. That is the point of posting. A correction is a new entry that offsets the first, so the record shows what happened and what was done about it rather than showing a tidy version of history.
That is why the draft state exists: it is where an entry is checked before it becomes permanent.
Drafts block the close
Draft entries have to be posted or voided before a period can be closed, and the close surface names the ones in the way.
This is the mechanism that stops a half-finished entry from sitting in limbo across a period boundary, and it is the most common thing blocking a month end.
Reading an entry
Every entry carries a date, a description, and the lines with their accounts and amounts.
The description is the part that matters in a year. "Adjustment" tells whoever reads it nothing. "Accrue December rent, invoice not yet received" tells them everything, and they will be reading it during an audit with no memory of the circumstances.
Balanced or not posted
An entry whose two sides do not agree cannot be posted.
That is enforced rather than warned about, and it is the reason the trial balance can be trusted: an unbalanced ledger is not a state the system will enter, so a trial balance that does not balance points at something more specific than arithmetic.
Which period an entry lands in
The entry date decides the period, not the date it was created.
That is what lets you post an adjustment in early February that belongs to January, and it is also why the close matters: once January is locked, that no longer works, and the entry has to go to February with an explanation.
Dates matter more than they look
An entry carries the date the thing happened, which is frequently not the date it was written.
Getting that right is what makes accrual accounting work: a December invoice recorded in January belongs to December, and dating it correctly is the whole mechanism.
Reading the ledger
Entries are listed by date with their description and their lines.
Two ways to use it. Chronologically, when reconstructing what happened around a date. And by account, when a figure on a statement looks wrong and you want to see what went into it.
The second is the more common and the more useful. A statement line is a total; the entries behind it are the explanation, and the answer to almost every "why is this number what it is" question is in that list.
Where entries come from
Every entry records what produced it: an invoice, a payment, an expense, a payroll run, or a person.
That provenance is what makes the ledger auditable rather than merely correct. An entry with no source is a manual one, and a ledger where most entries have no source is a ledger somebody is maintaining by hand.
Two habits
Write descriptions for a stranger. In practice that stranger is you, eleven months later, under time pressure.
Keep hand-written entries rare and deliberate. A ledger full of manual entries is a ledger where the automatic posting is not doing its job, and the underlying mapping problem will keep producing work until somebody fixes it.
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