General Ledger overview

The General Ledger is the central ledger for a company, where you maintain accounts, journals, and financial report data. General Ledger features include standards-compliant double-entry accounting, true closing of the books, and flexible tracking of Compliance, tax, and other adjustment entries.

The General Ledger comes with several standard reports that you can run right away. These include the Trial Balance report, deferred revenue reports, reports showing department and location activity, and more. See the summary of standard General Ledger reports for details.

Key tasks

Use the General Ledger to complete the following tasks:

  • Add, modify, reverse, delete, and post transactions to a journal.
  • Import data from spreadsheets and other accounting applications. Quickly upload data for journals, beginning account balances, journal entries, and budgets.
  • Fine-tune standard financial reports and drill down from financial statement line items to individual transactions.
  • Create and customize variations of reports, including income statements, balance sheets, statement of cash flows, and more.
  • Create statistical accounts that allow you to generate metrics such as revenue for each employee.
  • Create account groups that act as a building block for financial reports. These groups allow you to organize and roll up individual accounts into larger categories.
  • Create templates for nonfinancial users to enter General Ledger transactions without dealing with the intricacies of account numbers, departments, and locations.
  • Define accounting sequences by entity and year if your locale requires it (applies to multi-entity companies).

Automatic posting from subledgers

Intacct is a multi-ledger system. Transactions posted to subledger applications, such as Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and Cash Management, are posted to the General Ledger in real time.

  • Transaction details are recorded in the subledgers and summary transactions are recorded in the General Ledger.

  • Summary transactions in the General Ledger have links back to the detailed subledger transactions to enable drill down from reports.