Journals provide an audit trail of adjustments made to underlying data. When data is imported, a trial balance journal is automatically created. Each import overwrites the previous import’s trial balance journal; therefore, only one trial balance journal exists for each entity in each dataset.
You can create your own journals to adjust imported values. Your manually created journal are used to adjust general ledger accounts (accounts that appear in the chart of accounts), and tax accounts (mapped values that flow to your calculations).
For example, you would create a manual journal when a late adjustment to your trial balance has not been posted to the accounts (for example, a late audit adjustment for which you want to show an audit trail). If this adjustment was processed in your source system and included in an import file, you can delete the journal to remove the adjustment so you are not double-counting it.
Journals are expected to balance and the system validates this when saving a journal. After a journal is created, you can see adjustments resulting from the net impact of journals for an entity by drilling down into a calculation or on the Trial Balance screen ().
Journals are optional. You can also adjust values in each calculation’s
Income Statement
and
Balance Sheet
using a manual adjustment column.