The General ledger section in the Navigation Pane is the core financial section. In this section, you define and manage the financial records of the company, including:

• Company currencies
  
• Ledger accounts within the chart of accounts
  
• Fiscal periods and fiscal years
  
• Sales taxes (for both sales and purchases)
  
• Journals for posting to ledger accounts and accounts in other sections, for example, the Accounts receivable and Accounts payable sections
  
• System accounts for automatic posting
  
• Parameters, defaults, and number sequences that apply to ledger accounts and ledger transactions.
  
• Dimensions, dimension sets and hierarchies, and financial statements
  
• Optional features related to journals and posting
  
• Sales tax specific to countries/regions
  
• Vendor withholding tax
  
• Ledger budgets and period allocation keys
  
• Fixed assets
  

In the journals, you can post transactions to accounts, set up periodic transactions, retrieve and view data that you have entered, and create and print reports. You can set up rules about how the journals function. For example, you can decide to keep journals after posting for reference purposes or to delete them during posting.

You can set up controls that govern posting to various ledger accounts and journals, including an approval system in journals. You can use the audit trail functionality to view all ledger account transactions in chronological order, and to identify the user who posted each transaction and the time of the transaction.

The following topics provide information about the general ledger.

Tip
If the subject you are interested in is not covered in the following topics, you can access a separate Help topic in each form by pressing F1. This topic introduces the form, provides links to procedures that you perform within the form, and explains the tabs, buttons, and fields that are found on the form.