The General Ledger Report is a a report that shows the balance at the beginning of the time period for the selected account(s), the change in the account over the selected time period, and the balance at the end of that time period. You can choose as many or as few accounts as you select, and you can choose to see simply a summary of the changes, or you can choose a detailed report that shows each line item that affected the account(s) in question. This is a good report to run at year end to see change over the course of the year for all your accounts.
To access the General Ledger report, click on Reports, choose General Ledger and click the "Select" button.
There are a few different options to the General Ledger report:
» Activity From—This section lets you set the date range for the report. Any transactions for the selected accounts will be included in the balances for your report. The button with the circular arrows, when clicked, give you a variety of pre-set options for date ranges, such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th quarter dates for the current year, a full year date range for the current year, and the full month for the previous month.
» Level of Detail—There are two options in Level of Detail, either "Summarize checks/deposits" or "Detail checks/deposits" (This also does include journal entries, despite the name.) In "Summarize checks/deposits", you'll see the selected accounts, the balance at the beginning of the date range you selected, the total change in the account, with a short summary of how deposits, checks and journals affected the account, and the balance at the end of the date range you selected. "Detail checks/deposits" will show each selected account, the balance at the beginning of the period, and then each transaction that affected the account in the period, including dates, descriptions, amounts and a running balance of the changes or running balance of the account itself. At the end of all the transactions, you'll see the ending balance for the period for the account
» Account Selection—You can select the accounts you'll be using for the report in one of two ways. You can select an account range, where you can pick what funds, account types, major groups, minor groups, sequence and responsibility codes you want to see. Click on any one of the buttons for those items to make your selections. You can also use the 'Individual Accounts" option. This will let you select your accounts from an alphabetically sorted checklist of all your accounts.
There are also a variety of options you can use to change how this report is generated
» Include accounts w/no transactions—This option, when checked, will show any accounts that fall within your selected accounts that have no transactions on your report. If you leave this box unchecked, any accounts that didn't have any transactions for the period will not show on your report.
» Include inactive accounts—If this option is checked, any accounts that have been designated as inactive in your chart of accounts, if they fall in with your range of accounts you're looking at, will appear on your General Ledger report.
» Sort Transactions by date only —This option is only selectable if you use the "Detail checks/deposits" option. If you check this box, instead of sorting your transactions by transaction type (Checks, Deposits, Journal entries), your transactions will be sorted by date.
» Include memo & line descriptions —This option is only selectable if you use the "Detail checks/deposits" option. If you check this box, you will also see the memo line for each transaction in addition to the line item descriptions.
» Use year-to-date Running Balance —This option is only selectable if you use the "Detail checks/deposits" option. If you check this box, instead of seeing a running balances of the total change being made to the account, you'll see a running balance for the account, showing how each transaction changed the balance on the account
» No Color —This option ensures that the report doesn't print with any special coloring for the report.
When you're ready to view your report, you have a few options. First, if you want to print your report out straight away, click print. If you'd like to see a preview of your report first, click on preview, where you can see what your report will look like first. Finally, if you'd prefer to have your report in a spreadsheet format, click the button with the blue arrow pointing to the blue grid, and you'll get a spreadsheet of your data from the report.