The General Ledger Accounting team is responsible for recording transactions and maintaining the General Ledger (commonly abbreviated to GL).
The GL is meant to:
serve as a factual record of all transactions,
describe assets and liabilities,
describe operating results over a period of time,
be used in constructing the Trial Balance (TB) used for compiling financial statements (statement of activities, statement of financial position, statement of net assets, statement of cash flow, and notes to the financial statements),
provide information for preparing tax returns and information returns (990, 990T, 1099s, W-2s),
support management reporting for decision-makers at the University to use to inform and guide investment, budgeting, and forecasts.
For a General Ledger to be useful, appropriate controllership over the integrity of describing transactions, assets, and liabilities in the language of accrual accounting.
The GL should not be used in place of departmental records for day-to-day planning and reporting.
These are at a level of detail too granular to be useful in preparing the trial balance, but each subledger should be reconciled to the general ledger on a monthly basis.