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Review the journal
Read every entry your daily work produced, over a date range you choose, and check it balances.
- Steps
- 3 · About 2 min
- Who can do this
- Owner · Manager · Accountant
Daily work does the bookkeeping. That sentence sits on the accounting screen and describes the whole design: confirming an invoice, taking a payment, receiving goods, closing a till, posting payroll — each writes its own accounting entry as it happens.
The journal is where you read what they wrote.
Choose the range
What to look at:
From — the first date included.
To — the last. It defaults to the year so far, which is usually what you want; narrow it to a month when you are checking one declaration, or to a single day when you are hunting one figure.
Everything below — the register and the trial balance — follows this range. Change it and both move together, which is the point: a trial balance for a period other than the one you are reading is worse than none.
Read the register
Each entry carries its date, its journal code, a description, a reference, and its lines with a debit or a credit against an account.
Nearly all of them will name the document that caused them. That is what makes the journal readable rather than a wall: an entry that surprises you has a source you can open, and the answer to "where did this come from" is one click, not an investigation.
The ones with no document behind them are the manual entries somebody posted deliberately. They are worth more attention than the rest, precisely because nothing in daily work produced them.
Check the trial balance
Below the register, every account with its total debits and total credits.
The two column totals must be equal. They will be — double entry makes it so — but reading them serves a different purpose: an account with a balance you did not expect is a question worth asking while the month is fresh, and this is the shortest list that shows you all of them at once.
From here, the financial statements arrange the same figures into a result and a position.
The journal reads. It does not edit. A wrong entry is corrected by posting its opposite, never by changing what was written — which is why an entry you can see here is an entry that will still be there next year, whatever happened afterwards.
Next, you might want to
- Post a manual journal entryRecord an accounting entry that no invoice, payment or stock movement produced — and only when that is really the case.
- Read the income statement, balance sheet and ledgerSee profit, financial position, and every movement behind them — each total traceable back to the entries that made it.
- Close and reopen a periodStop new entries landing in a month you have already declared — and know how to let one back in when you must.