Opening and closing a journal

When you enter a transaction that has a direct affect on General Ledger, open a journal. General Ledger is not updated until the journal is closed. In the event of a power outage, use the instructions for opening an existing journal to finish a task.

Journals that are opened through the reporting service, such as in GL Transaction Entry and the Vendor Entry Pay Invoices Due Report, are not processed if the operator has the same journal open. Only one journal can be open at a time for these processes. The scheduled report is set to an error condition and logged to the reporting service error log. The report must be rescheduled. Any associated group will still be available to be rerun. The reporting service processes a report that opens a journal, while another journal is open, if the journals are not for the same function.

Use these instructions to open a journal:

  1. Accept or change the default values of the period and post date.

    You can post forward or backward. The values accepted here are determined by settings in SA Administrator Options-Financials-Period Structure.

  2. Optionally, specify amounts in Proof Debit and Credit.
    Note: You are not permitted to change the default GL Account code. If you must change the account, do so in GL Account Setup and reassign the default account codes for the entry function.
  3. Click OK.

General Ledger is not updated until the journal is closed. When you exit a function that required you to open a journal, the journal is closed. To manually close a journal, click Close Journal.