General ledger

The general ledger (GL) is where accounting actually lives. Every posted transaction lands in it as a journal entry — dated, referenced, and split across accounts from the chart of accounts. Subsidiary records feed it: the invoices you issue post to receivables and revenue, the bills you approve post to payables and expenses, bank activity posts to cash. Financial statements are not stored anywhere; they are computed from the ledger, which is why the ledger’s integrity is the whole game.

Why it matters

The test of a GL is whether reports are derived or decorated. In weak systems, the P&L is a dashboard someone can nudge; in a real one, every report figure traces back through the ledger to source transactions, and an auditor can walk the path. The related question is what feeds the ledger: if invoicing, inventory and payroll live in separate tools, someone reconciles exports between them forever. A ledger inside the operational system posts from the source event itself.

How the general ledger works in Oneop

Oneop’s GL is double-entry, enforced by both the application and a database trigger that refuses unbalanced entries. Each workspace starts with a seeded chart of accounts, four journals — General, AR, AP and Banking — a fiscal year and twelve monthly periods. Periods lock; corrections post linked reversals rather than edits.

Posting comes from real events in the same system. Issuing an invoice posts receivable, revenue and tax in one atomic transaction. Approving a bill posts payables. Inventory movements post value at weighted-average or FIFO cost, with idempotent COGS posting. In the project-management module, tracked time becomes an invoice and then a real journal entry. Multi-currency documents each store their own exchange rate as at the document date, and every ledger line carries both transaction and base currency amounts.

Reporting reads posted rows only: P&L, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Cash Flow, GL detail and AR/AP aging — and the Trial Balance returns a computed balanced flag rather than assuming it ties.

Stated plainly: every workspace has this GL, seeded and ready — there is nothing to switch on. The plan decides how much of it you can reach: invoicing on every tier, payables, expenses, tax and bank reconciliation from Pro, multi-currency from Business.

Related terms: double-entry accounting. Product page: Finance.