Overview of Journal Entry and Actions

Journal entries are posted to the ledger to record data from accounting transactions that reflect your entity's business events. Journal creation, approval, posting, and editing work together in the recording process to produce accurate financial records.

Creating Journal Entries

The process begins with creating journals. You can create journals in several ways:

• Enter manually directly in the ledger.

• Use a spreadsheet interface.

• Import journals into the ledger.

• Create automatically from formulas or processes.

All methods produce a journal entry consisting of:

• A batch that determines the accounting period of all journals associated with the batch.

• One or more journals, with a category and a currency assigned to each.

  Note: For cross-currency journals, the currency is assigned at the line level.

• Lines that contain the accounting for the transaction.

Note: You can view the combined description for the entire account combination on all lines simultaneously during journal entry.

Save to create the journal entry. Complete the journal to submit it for posting. After creation, apply an optional journal approval process to the entry.

A journal entry that has been saved, completed, and, if necessary, approved, is available for posting.

Approving Journal Entries

If you're using journal approval, you can select the Request Approval action for the journal batch to initiate the approval process. After the batch is approved, you must then post it. If you skip the action of requesting approval, and instead select to post the batch, or if the batch is picked up for posting through an AutoPost criteria set, the batch proceeds through the approval process, after which posting is automatically submitted.

Note: You can edit approved journals that aren't posted. After you make your changes, you must resubmit the journal for approval. For more information, see this topic: Can I edit a journal that's approved and not yet posted?

Posting Journal Entries

You can post journal entries only in open accounting periods. Keep all but the current periods closed to prevent posting of amounts in incorrect periods. During the posting process, the journal entry is validated and, if successful, the credit and debit amounts are updated to their respective accounts in the ledger. You can't change a journal entry that's posted.

Once posting has finished successfully, run reports and performs queries on the updated account balances in the ledger.

Note: You can configure security using the Post privilege to allow certain users to review and post journals, but not create or modify them.

Editing Journal Entries

Edit journal entries as needed before they're posted. After posting, either reverse and enter the journal again, or enter a new journal to correct the amounts in question.

Note: You can edit approved journals that aren't posted. After you make your changes, you must resubmit the journal for approval. For more information, see this topic: Can I edit a journal that's approved and not yet posted?