Exercise 13

General Ledger and the Trial Balance

Hopefully if you have come to this point you have completed Exercises 7, 8, 9 and 10. In these exercises you worked on Journals (Cash Payments, Cash Receipts, Purchases, Sales). Now it is time to do something with your answers. So I hope you kept them!

Before proceeding with this exercise you might like to read the page "The General Ledger".

Download the Microsoft Excel Workbook containing the General Ledger The General Ledger has been completed for January and February. Your task will be to update the General Ledger with postings for the month of March using the Journals you have completed in Exercises 7, 8, 9 and 10. You should try to be really careful. It is very easy to make mistakes in posting journal summaries to the general ledger. Common mistakes are as follows: 1 Posting to the wrong side i.e posting a debit amount to the credit side of the general ledger (or vice versa). 2 Transposing figures as you post i.e. post $369.60 as $396.60 (or similar errors) 3 Failing to post the journal completely i.e. missing an item becuase you did not tick off every item as you go 4 Making arithmetic errors in calculating new account balances. 5 Posting to the wrong account (this is not an error that will show up by a General ledger that does not balance.

When you have made all your journal postings, and calculated new balances for each account, you should prepare a new Trial Balance, and check that it balances.

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Copyright Leo Isaac 2002