General Ledger

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 2/24/2018 4:54 PM, Dave H wrote:
> Well from my point of view that is confusing.  Nobody in my world refers to
> a "General Journal" we refer to the "General Ledger" and we do journals
> :-)  I've never actually heard the term general journal used anywhere
> before until this discussion over the weekend !!!
>
> Cheers Dave H.

Old time distinction (not that long ago, within my lifetime)

In the really old days (hundreds of years ago) there would be just one 
journal into which all transactions of the enterprise would have been 
entered in chronological order. But as enterprises grew in size and 
complexity, this became burdensome. Can you imagine a merchant 
enterprise that might have thousands of sales a day (perhaps spread over 
a dozen stores). How could some poor bookkeeper get those entered into a 
single journal.

Imagine a solution where at each store was a journal to record the sales 
transaction (a subsidiary journal) while at company headquarters a main 
journal maintained by the company bookkeeper. Call that journal the 
"general journal". So at the agreed time interval (every day, every 
week, etc.) the bookkeeper at each store would transmit a single 
transaction to headquarters (total receipts, total sales) and the head 
bookkeeper would enter those transactions into the "general journal". 
Things like "petty cash" might have their own journal (and ledger) and 
once a month a transaction to "general journal" to the totals of each 
account and the replenishment of cash. Notice that this also allowed 
restriction of access to the main books. The clerks in each store only 
could access the local books.

The term "general journal" (and "general ledger") refer to the MAIN 
books. The confusion for you is that most of us using gnucash are doing 
so for small enough enterprises that we don't need to partition the 
books this way. The only ledger IS the "general ledger" (no subsidiary 
ledgers) and the journal is virtual in any case. We do enter the 
transaction (and then post it) but in effect enter it on already posted 
form in the ledger an the computer can figure out what would have been 
the journal entry that resulted in this. The developers COULD have 
chosen to have us enter transactions into a journal and have the 
computer auto post those to the ledger, but most of us would have found 
that less direct in terms of looking at stuff.

BUT (and this is an important but) perhaps many who are asking for 
"multiple people simultaneously accessing gnucash books" are doing so 
because "too much work for one person" don't know the history, how this 
WAS handled with subsidiary books and gnucash could easily handle it 
that way. With the added benefits that the "local bookkeepers" (the 
clerks in the stores, etc.) can enter the transactions without having 
access to the main books and that main books can avoid the clutter of 
unnecessary details.

Michael D Novack

Michael D Novack