General ledger

The complete record of every transaction, sorted into the accounts from your chart of accounts. Every report is built from it.

Example

Every invoice, payment, salary and subscription charge, categorised and dated.

Important

If the ledger is wrong, every number downstream is wrong — your runway, your margin, your investor update. This is why bookkeeping discipline matters more than financial sophistication at small scale.

Related terms

• Chart of accounts — The list of categories every transaction gets recorded into — your revenue lines, cost lines, assets and liabilities.
• Bookkeeping — Recording every transaction accurately and on time.
• Trial balance — A list of every account's balance, used to check that total debits equal total credits before producing statements.
• Journal entry — A single record of a transaction in the ledger, with equal debits and credits.

Lessons that explain it

• Where to actually start keeping books — Day one, with no accounting background and no system. What to record, where to put it, and the three habits that make everything after this easy. (12 min)
• Building a chart of accounts — The twenty-odd categories every transaction lands in. Get this right once and every report you ever run is useful; get it wrong and no amount of software helps. (12 min)

All 176 terms in the Founder glossary