Single line journal report

Journal auditing can be hard work. Say you have a general ledger dump and you want to identify all journals to cash accounts. That's easy enough, just apply a filter to the account code. But then you've only got one side of the journal. To get both, you need to extract that filtered set of journals, then reapply to the original dataset as a join, matching on the journal identifier.

What would be really useful is a report from the accounting system that gives both sides of the journal entry in one line of the report. One column would should the account code debited, and another the account code credited. Applying filters to each of these columns makes it very easy to see where journals are going.

To get this work, the system would need to force all journals to be two-entry only equal and opposite (rather than those that say debit two accounts and credit one). But having such a rule would be not bad thing, as it would give a granularity of data in the ledger.

Net transaction view

Often, trying to understand what comprises the balance on a GL account can be challenging, particularly where there a lots of journal entries (e.g. reclassifications and reversing journals).

Reclassification and reversing journals should be linked on the system. The user should be able to pick up a line entry (in the case of a reclassification) or a double entry (for reversing journals) and then execute an action (e.g. change the account code or cost centre, or reverse, etc). Such an action should still go through the journal segregation of duty/authorisation process and supporting documentation be retained.

The advantage of a system that links entries on the GL is that it allows a "net transaction view", i.e. only showing where transactions ended up (not how they got there). The full audit trail is there on the system if needed, but the "net transaction view" allows the contents of the ledger to be more easily understood.