General ledger
Financial Accounting glossary · The Accounting Cycle & Financial Statements
Definition
The complete set of accounts maintained by an entity.
General ledger in plain English
The general ledger is the master binder holding every "account" a company tracks — one page for cash, one for what it owes, one for sales, and so on. If the journal is the running diary of events, the ledger is where those events get filed onto the right page so you can see the total for each category at a glance. It's like taking every receipt from a shoebox and sorting them into labeled folders — one folder per topic — so you always know the running balance of each. Nearly every financial report a company produces is built from the numbers living in this ledger.
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