Accounting Transaction: General Journal

In the Bookkeeping course we showed the effects of transactions by making entries in T accounts. However- these entries do not provide the necessary data for a particular transaction - nor do they provide a chronological record of transactions.

The missing information is furnished by the use of an accounting form known as the journal.

General Journal
The  journal, or day book, is the book of original entry for accounting data.
-  It is the first book to record financial transaction in chronological order.
-  It has spaces for date, accounts titles & explanations, references, and two money columns, as illustrated below:

Afterward - the data is transferred or posted to the ledger, the book of sub­sequent or secondary entry. The various transactions are evidenced by sales tickets, purchase invoices, check stubs, and so on. On the basis of this evidence, the transactions are entered in chronological order in the journal. The process is called journalizing. A number of different journals may be used in a business. For our purposes, they may be grouped into general journals and specialized jour­nals.
The latter type - which are used in businesses with a large number of repetitive transactions, are described in Chapter 6. To illustrate journal­izing - we here use the general journal, whose standard form is shown be­
low.

Journalizing

Entering transaction data into Journal is known as Journalizing.

Steps for journalizing a transaction
-  Analyze the transaction to determine which accounts are affected.
-  Analyze the accounts to determine which account is the debit part and which one is the credit part.
-  Record the transaction following the example illustrated below.

Note:   The date should be entered in the date column.
-  The year and the month are not repeated until the start of a new page or a new month.

-  The title of the account to be debited is entered against the left margin of the title & explanation column.

-  The amount to be debited to each account is entered in the debit column on the same line as the account title. ( The debit amount for each account is entered in this col­umn. Generally, there is only one item, but there could be two or more separate items.)

-  The account to be credited follows the same steps except being in the credit side.
( The credit amount for each account is entered in this col­umn. Here again, there is generally only one account, but there could be two or more accounts involved with different amounts. )

-  An explanation of the transaction may be entered on the next line below the journal entry.

-  The posting reference column is left blank till the transaction is being posted.

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