About Me

So, I'm trapped in audit. At least for the time being. Whilst I'm here I may as well make constructive use of my time. So I'll share some of my thoughts and experiences

Saturday, May 14, 2011

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.

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