A journal entry is a transaction in General Ledger that affects one or more of your general ledger accounts. You must enter both the credit and debit for each journal entry in General Ledger (or, in the Business product, in Module Preferences you can choose to allow unbalanced transactions; however, the debits and credits in the batch still need to balance before you can post). The other modules in Denali automatically create and post to the opposing accounts, so you only have to enter transactions once.

Journal entries are useful to make adjustment transactions directly in General Ledger. For example, if you chose not to enter forwarding balances (see Entering Beginning Account Balances (Balance Forwards)) when you initially entered your General Ledger accounts and you find that you need to add a balance to a ledger account, you must post a journal entry to adjust that account.

If your modules are integrated, the only times you need to make entries directly into General Ledger are when you need to make an adjusting entry (see Adjusting Journal Entries After Posting for more information on this type of entry), or in if you have a transaction that doesn’t affect any other modules. If you don’t integrate your modules, then you will manually enter transactions for everything that needs to post in General Ledger.