Can someone explain what the general ledger is in financial accounting?
The general ledger is the listing of transactions of your business, broken down by account. A single transaction will show up in two places in your general ledger (also known in accounting shorthand as “GL”) because a journal entry should affect two different accounts under a double entry bookkeeping system. All the transactions of your business will show up on the GL – checks written deposits made, sales recorded, inventory or fixed assets purchases, adjusting journal entries made, etc. Basically it is the detail transaction information that makes up the balances on your balance sheet and profit and loss statements. In the “old days’ of paper bookkeeping systems the GL is where you’d get the information with which to prepare the balance sheet and profit and loss.
