General Ledger

The General Ledger (GL) tracks all transactions that have been posted, including receipts, checks and invoices. The GL is then capable of redisplaying these transactions in detail and reporting on them through the Financial Statements.

The General Ledger, based on a Chart of Accounts, is the heart of any accounting system. As you run your day to day office activities, Brief Accounting will automatically update your General Ledger and keep all your bookkeeping up-to-date.

The Chart of Accounts is broken down into 7 main categories:

Assets, Liabilities, Revenue, Disbursements, Expenses and Suspense.

In consultation with your bookkeeper or accountant, you will set up the Chart of Accounts to suit your individual practice.

The General Ledger allows you to:

• Setup or modify the Chart of Accounts
• Create and post Adjusting Journal Entries (AJE's)
• Monitor activity, source and view accounting detail for each General Journal Entry (drill down feature)
• Monitor activity and view accounting detail using a bank account journal (General or Trust)

Using the information collected in the General Ledger, you can print:

• Trial Balance
• Balance Sheet, including Work-In-Progress (WIP) option
• Income Statement, including WIP option
• General Ledger cards, sorted by GL entry number, for each Chart of Account (summary or detail)

To maintain full accountability for audit purposes, Brief Accounting has the ability to print out any and all transactions that affect the Chart of Accounts and your bank accounts. In addition, Brief Accounting automatically prints out a hard copy record of every posted transaction using a daily "Posting Report". This report establishes a complete "audit trail", so that others following in your footsteps can reconstruct or verify your transactions. Preserving this audit trail is a key part of meeting Law Society guidelines.