General Ledger Accounting Software

To be able to understand general ledger software you need to know what a general ledger (GL) is. If you already know everything you want to and more about a GL I suggest you skip down a paragraph or two. The GL is the place where most of the important accounting information is gathered. The GL has separate accounts for sales, purchases, current assets, fixed assets, payables and more. For example when a company sells some of its goods it debits cash or accounts receivable on the GL and it credits sales. An accounting system may be more complex than this, but that is the basic idea.

General ledger accounting software is just software that takes care of all your GL journal entries. Instead of writing in the debits and credits by hand you are doing it with a computer. The nice thing about accounting general ledger software is that it will lead you by the hand and help you not to make mistakes on what should be a debit and what should be a credit.

Most software packages come with a general ledger component built in. However, some of the more sophisticated models may still require you to buy the general ledger accounting software separately. Unless you are looking for some custom-built high-tech accounting software I would just recommend buying a normal accounting software package (it should have everything you need).

One big advantage of buying GL software is that it can generate financial reports in seconds. This can come in very handy if you just want to take a quick look at the position of your company. It can also be very nice for showing professional looking statements to potential investors.

Price of GL Accounting Software

I’m always hesitant to offer pricing information on general ledger accounting software for two reasons: (1) the range of the prices is extremely wide and (2) the products vary so dramatically from a complete package to simply a general ledger spreadsheet.

If you really want and you have a fairly simple company you could probably get some form of accounting software that would meet your needs for free. I’ve also seen companies offer to write code and completely customize the software for a company for over $20,000. If you wanted to play it safe you could get Quick Books General Ledger software for around $100. I believe they call it simple-start. This is probably a safe bet because you know you have at least a semi-reliable general ledger accounting software package because of the Intuit name brand.