QuickBooks General Ledger

Creation and printing of a general ledger is one of the most important features of the QuickBooks software. It allows accountants and business owners to access a snapshot the transactions made quite effortlessly. Every time a transaction is performed (payment received or payment made) by you, it creates a journal entry and the same gets reflected in your general ledger. With this feature, you can also customize the available accounts through the QuickBooks basic accounts manager.

Sounds interesting? Would you like to know more about this? Read this blog till the end. We will tell you everything you want to know about this, right from the scratch!

Let’s proceed then!

What is QuickBooks General Ledger?

In simple terms, a general ledger in QuickBooks is nothing but a comprehensive report of each and every transaction assigned to each and every account. As you are aware of, there is a credit and debit account against every transaction and the general ledger would list all these for you.

When we do record-keeping manually, we need to maintain separate journals against each task. In QuickBook, these journals are divided into 3 parts-

• Accounts payable– Includes the day-to-day records of the purchases made by a company and the invoices it is yet to pay
• Accounts receivable– Includes the day-to-day records of the sales and receipts by a company, along with the invoices yet to be paid by its clients
• Payroll– Includes the records of the compensation to be made to the employees of the company, along with applicable taxes.

The user will need to enter his monthly activities into the QuickBooks General Ledger. If the entries are made correctly, the books of the company would balance perfectly.

Steps to Create Journal Entries for QuickBooks General Ledger

You can create journal entries in QuickBooks by following the below-mentioned steps-

• Go to  ‘Company Menu’ and choose ‘Make General Journal Entries’
• Enter the appropriate date in the ‘Date’ field and in the ‘Entry No’ field
• Enter the entries in the General Ledger
• Select the first account related to your transaction.
• In the ‘Debit’ and ‘Credit’ columns, enter the appropriate debit/credit amount against the account you have just selected
• In the ‘Memo’ column, type a description about the transaction.
• Select the name of the Employee/Vendor /Supplier/Customer associated with the particular transaction
• Assign a ‘Class’ to the said amount
• Repeat steps 4 to 8 for all the distribution lines till the transaction attains zero balance.
• Click ‘Save and Close’ to save your journal entry and close the window. If you want to open a new window on exit, click ‘Save and New’

Steps to Generate the General Ledger Report in QuickBooks

Here are the steps to generate the general ledger report in QuickBooks –

• Go to the navigation panel on the left side and select the ‘Report’ option
• Select ‘Close All’
• Scroll to the bottom of your screen and click on ‘For My Accountant’
• Now select ‘General Ledger’
• Select the appropriate’ Date Range’
• Choose  from ‘Cash’ or ‘Accrual basis’
• Finally, click on ‘Run Report’ to generate the ledger report

How To Print General Ledger In QuickBooks?

Here are the steps to print a general ledger in QuickBooks-

• Go to ‘Print Reports’
• Click ‘Transaction Reports’ and choose ‘General Ledger’
• Enter the appropriate month and the year
• Make sure to leave the field named ‘Account Range’ blank, if you want to print the entire General Ledger. Alternately, if you want to take the print of the ledger for a particular account range, enter the starting and ending account number for that range. Please have in mind that if you enter the account limit, you will almost certainly experience a balance error. This is because debit and credit transactions do not often match for a specified account limit.  Also note that the general ledger report is not date-sensitive. This means any transaction you enter within a specific month will get reflected in the report, even if the date of the transaction belongs to another month. This will be helpful if you wish to enter quarterly balances
• Click ‘Print’ to start printing the report. You can also click the ‘Preview’ tab to view the report on your screen before printing.

Some Points To Keep In Mind Regarding QuickBooks General Ledger

• The QuickBooks General Ledger follows the double-entry method while generating the financial statements
• The amounts of both the credit and debit must be equal
• The used number of the credit and debit accounts should not be equal
• At least 1 credit and debit entry are allowed against a particular journal entry

QuickBooks has really made lives much easier for business owners across the globe. It seamlessly supervises the financial transactions made by a company and also carries out other tasks normally done by an accountant. This accounting software carries out all the calculations, organizes all the accounting information and makes them available , just at the click of a tab. Hope the above discussion would help you a great a deal in mastering the General Ledger feature in QuickBooks. With this tool, you will be able to have a more efficient and organized tracking of your business spending than ever before.