General Ledger Manage Data Requirements
General Ledger Data Overview
The General Ledger contains posted financial data organized by account. Typically, it contains the year-to-date and/or periods for each account. Period balances may have one of several types, but they nearly always contain a budget value, an encumbrance value, and an actual/spent value. In some systems, the year-to-date actual/spent value is referred to as a “memo balance”. Some systems cannot record negative dollar amounts, and therefore provide all values in a debit or credit field or have a debit or credit attribute to indicate if the balances are positive or negative. It is best to include all variations of the budget–original budget, revised budget, etc.– when more than one is available. Summarizing transactions by fiscal year, account code and status should result in the same values in this file.
General Ledger Data Elements:
Element | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
Primary Key | Unique identifier for each record. | |
Updated At | Time stamp of the last time this record was updated. | |
Account Code | Account Code. | 100-20-345-6789 |
Segments | Code for each account segment/dimension. | 100 | 20 | 345 | 6789 |
Original Budget | The Adopted/Original Budget Value for the Account Defined by the Segments. | 123.45 |
Budgeted Amount | The Revised Budgeted Value for the Account Defined by the Segments. | 456.78 |
Actual Amount | The Year-to-Date Spending in this Account. | 12.34 |
Encumbered Amount | The Year-to-Date Encumbrances in this Account. | 1.23 |
Fiscal Year | The Fiscal Year that this entry is to be included in. | 2023 |
General Ledger Data Validations:
Unique by primary key.
Unique by account code and fiscal year.
No null values.
Aggregate transactions by status should result in matching balances.
Segments or account dimensions exist in the segment data.