R7409C5 - (FRA) General Journal

According to commercial law and the French 1982 Chart of Accounts, businesses in France are required to maintain a record of all accounting entries in the General Journal. These entries must be recorded in the General Journal chronologically by the date when the entries are posted to the general ledger. Within the same date, the entries must be ordered by:

• Time when the entries are entered or posted.

• Type of transaction, such as purchase, sale, and miscellaneous expense.

• Account number order.

Businesses also have the option to use the General Journal to centralize all of the accounting entries that are recorded in auxiliary journals. In this case, the entries in the General Journal are a monthly summary of the detailed entries in the auxiliary journals. The requirement for recording accounting entries in the auxiliary journals is the same as for the General Journal, that is, all entries must be chronological. The General Journal can be divided into as many auxiliary journals as the business requires. You define auxiliary journals according to data selection on batch type and document type. For example:

• Purchases Auxiliary Journal (journal des achats)

• Sales Auxiliary Journal (journal des ventes)

• Cash Auxiliary Journal (journal de banque)

Based on the legislation of the General Chart of Accounts, the summary of the General Journal program should be presented in debit and credit format, and not on a cumulative balance. In addition, businesses can summarize the journal under the condition that all documents which are required to verify the daily entries are kept on file.

The format of the General Journal has not been completely defined by the law. However, for an information system, the General Journal should be in the form of electronic documents that are printed on a report. The electronic documents should offer all of the guarantees in terms of disallowing the modification or deletion of the accounting entries once the entries have been validated. The General Journal must be kept in French.

When you run the General Journal program, the system:

• Prints a report of all the entries in the F0911 table in chronological order.

  The entries are the same entries that are printed on the General Ledger report, but they are sorted by general ledger date rather than by account.

• Prints the entries in detail, with one line for each account, and one line for each document number and type.

Additional features of the General Journal report include:

• Option to print by period and fiscal year, or by date range.

• Ability to accumulate multiple ledger types.

• Inclusion of the company in the header.

• Option to print by object and subsidiary, or category code.

• User-defined report totals, including:

  • General total

  • Total by company

  • Total by period

  • Total by batch type

• User-defined date sequencing, including:

  • Sequence by G/L date, document number, and document type.

  • Sequence by batch, document number, and document type.