Printing and thoroughly reviewing edit reports is time well spent. Very few people, regardless of skill or experience, can enter a large number of transactions without at least an occasional error. Once you post a transaction, it becomes part of the history and can only be “corrected” if you enter and post another entry. When you post errors and then correct them with reversing entries, the audit trail becomes unnecessarily cluttered.

A cluttered audit trail makes it difficult to verify the legitimacy of transaction entries or to find entries that you, your boss, or an auditor has questions about. For this reason, we suggest you save your edit reports and posting/audit reports in a secure filing system or in a secure computer file system at least until you close the fiscal year and the financial statements are approved.

See Audit Trail, Printing the Edit Report, and Printing the General Ledger Posting Reports for more information.