General Journal

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Been away, maybe this will help.

The old fashioned pen and ink on paper bookkeeping process worked like this.
1) Enter transaction into the journal. Could enter many transactions 
before going to the next step but simpler to consider just the one 
transaction.
2) POST that entry into the ledger accounts affected (and mark the entry 
in the journal "posted").

Perhaps the most common source of errors was during the posting process 
(transpose digits, etc.).

At the end of the process the transactions have been entered:
a) In the journal
b) In the ledger accounts affected

Gnucash and similar software applications have the SAME net effect. They 
allow you to enter the transaction starting in ANY of the affected 
ledger accounts and then the program  creates the corresponding  journal 
entry OR you could (if you preferred) enter into the journal  and the 
transaction would  be posted into the affected ledger accounts by the 
program. Except the computer won't make a posting error.

I do NOT disagree that it might be useful if the purpose were to be 
teaching "concepts of double entry bookkeeping" that the latter way 
might be useful. But for speed of working most people will choose to 
work "ledger first" for the same reason that back in pen and ink on 
paper days it was extremely common to do "cashbook accounting". Since 
90+% transactions affected the cash account these were NOT entered in 
the journal, just the cash account and the other ledger account(s) 
affected and only transactions where cash was NOT an account involved in 
the transaction would the normal "enter in journal then post process" be 
used. The reason for this was to reduce both the workload AND errors 
(since 90+% of errors were made during posting).

Michael D Novack

PS: You can not only see any transaction you are entering working from a 
ledger account "journal style" but you can also at any time produce "the 
journal" (it's one of the built in reports).